


Cult of personality

by AuntyAgonee



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: And he'll murder who he likes, Cannibalism, Cult activity, Domesticity, Hannibal is a good housekeeper, Major themes of violence, Mentions of small town prejudices, Multi, Murder Husbands, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Sexual Content, Will is an independent man
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-04-24 23:31:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 28
Words: 117,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4938151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dragon is dead, but Will and Hannibal are not.<br/>They're doing very nicely, in fact, settled into a marriage and a small town where they can murder about once a month without attracting much attention.<br/>A cult has taken centre-stage with their flashy violence, and seem to have a marked interest in everyone's favourite murder husbands. FBI agents converge to investigate, and if that's not bad enough, Margot Verger turns up bleeding on the doorstep, fresh from a struggle that ended in her wife and child being abducted. She won't rest, or leave, until she gets some help from the most accomplished murderers she knows.<br/>In the centre of it all is Will, trying not to lose his mind, and Hannibal, who just wants to enjoy his marriage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Small town lives

**Author's Note:**

> Like so many others after we had finished weeping and screaming under our desks, I felt compelled to write after the series had ended. Hannibal was really an immersing experience for me. It was more like watching one long art-piece than it was watching a TV show.  
> So, enter this. There's a touch of dark humour which may start out feeling out of place with the general atmosphere of the show, but give it some time. It might grow on you.  
> Mainly, I'm just here because I want to explore what Will looks like when he's not holding back. When nothing is too dark and no murder too brutal. He might become something that even out-does Hannibal, at some points.  
> Let's just see where this goes, shall we?

The girl has hardly been running for two minutes before she finds the road, and by then, a pair of head-lights has flooded the road. Sensory overload. First, the utter darkness of the woods, where the moonlight was swallowed by the canopy. Now, a sudden spotlight. She collapses to her bloodied knees, screaming and wringing her torn fists in her rumpled shirt. A finger is missing and has been carefully bound up, in such a way as to avoid excessive bleeding and to block infection. She is damaging the stump terribly by twisting it about in her shirt, but she is too far gone to notice her pain.

The car lays down several feet of rubber on the dirt road, avoiding her. Its front rockets past her, buffeting her with a hot wind and a spray of dirt. The girl screams again. She hides her face with one hand, and with the other beats the road- the damaged hand, so she leaves a bloody handprint.

A man’s voice bleeds into one of her ringing ears “…now. It’s alright. I have it covered.”

The girl cannot begin to fathom what he is saying. Her flight mode has long since over-powered the weak attempt at a fight that she staged in the house she is running from, which had also quickly engulfed any attempts at rational thinking that she will be able to make. She has barely registered the man’s presence when his hand falls lightly on her shoulder. This prompts another gurgling scream.

“Susan! It’s me! It’s Mark Columbus!”

The girl, Susan, breaks off into great gulping sobs at the sight of a familiar, friendly face and she buries her face in his shirt. It does not occur to her to ask herself what he is doing out on this remote, seldom-travelled road, which has only one destination further into the heart of the woods. Nor does it occur to her to wonder who he was talking to- had she been listening with an attentive ear, she would have noticed a marked, comfortable affection and could have easily guessed that the man was talking to his spouse. Even if she had taken these details and united them into the appropriate conclusion, it would have done her little good.

Mark Columbus has already guided her into the passenger seat of his car. 

He tries to talk her down, to get some sense out of the stammering strings coming out of her torn mouth. Her clothes are also too thin for the chill, so her chattering teeth work to butcher what little she can get out. Mark reaches around her to turn on the heater, and flips the glove-box shut on his way over.

Finally, she get something out “You h-have to dr-drive!”

“Ok, ok,” he gets into the driver’s seat and backs down the road “Can you tell me what happened?”

Susan grips the arm-rests in a terror. Her eyes scan the dark woods and the road ahead rapidly “He’s not ch-chasing me? He’s not-”

“Who, Susan? Who is not chasing you?”

She screws her eyes up tight, trying to rid herself of the image of that man. Of his welcoming smile and his lithe hands, which were quick and expert in subduing her when she tried to fight back.

“It’s the man…the man from…from the…”

Mark continues to back down the road, and with another hand is punching at the screen of his phone “I’m calling the police. What do I tell them?”

Before she can come up with something coherent, he grunts in frustration and tosses the phone into the back seat.

“Dammit! I don’t have service. Should I take you to the police or the hospital?”

“The police,” she gasps “We have to tell everyone! W-where are we?”

“Service road, in case he’s using the one that I found you on. Did he look like he was driving after you?”

Susan seizes a fistful of her hair in a burst of violent anxiety “I don’t know! But- but we gotta tell! We gotta tell everyone! He…he had me drugged…he took my finger and he- he said he was gonna eat me. Feed me to my parents.”

Mark’s face crumples in disgust “Who said this to you?”

“The man from the art museum.”

“James Faust?” he scoffs, incredulous “James Faust drugged you and plans to feed you to your parents?”

She lets out a shuddering sob “Y-y-yes…he’s fucking CRAZY!”

“Well, yeah, clearly.”

“Wh-where are we going?”

“I told you. This is a service road.”

The road up ahead is narrow and choked on all sides by the encroaching fans of branches. Susan feels a blank terror at the thought of going deeper into the forest- parallel to the man who tried to kill her, as oppose to screaming, in the opposite direction.

“I swear, it was him. It was Mr Faust.”

Mark speaks evenly, reasonably “Alright, I believe you. What I don’t understand is why he targeted  
you?”

“Be-because I’m a girl! I’m young and I’m pretty and I’m a fucking girl! I think it’s pretty fucking obvious why he went for me!” she hides her face in her hands again “Oh my God, I can’t- I don’t…what do I do?”

“Just calm down for a starter- start. Uh, start.”

When Susan can next bring herself to look up, away from the image of her attacker burned into her eye-lids, she is greeted by a much fresher image of him. Standing, tall and confident, in the middle of the road. Completely confident that the car is slowing for him, and will stop for him, which it does. 

The light falls on him, casting the kinds of shadows that climb the sides of vaults in the darkest corners of cemeteries. His eyes are little more than black beads, and they are trained on her.  
Susan grabs Mark’s arm as she begins to hyperventilate “Oh God- oh God, God, God, it’s him!”

Mark shakes her off easily “Hold on. Let me just talk to him.”

“NO! No, no! He’ll kill you!”

“No,” says Mark firmly “He won’t raise a hand against me.”

Susan watches helplessly as Mark gets out of the car and locks the doors behind him. He approaches James Faust without a hint of fear or hesitation.

 

 

“That was sloppy.” says Will Graham.

“That was an invitation,” Hannibal Lecter opens his arms to embrace his husband “I’m so pleased you accepted.”

Given the presence of an audience, now screaming and pounding on all the thick, tinted windows and trying each locked door in turn, they keep the kiss short and chaste. When they have broken apart, Hannibal slips an arm around Will’s shoulders as they contemplate the girl. Hannibal’s interest is the measured and clinical kind with which he looks on when he has experimentally injected a body with a new cocktail, and is anxious to observe the results. Will’s is a much lighter, much more detached brand. It is as if he is looking at an animal behind the bars of a zoo, which he has seen a thousand times before and can no longer summon the will to appreciate. 

“I take it she didn’t get very far?”

Will shakes his head “She was nearly hysterical when I found her.”

“She is completely hysterical now.”

“What would you have done if she escaped me, somehow?”

Hannibal smiles at the quaint suggestion “She would not have escaped you.”

“Hm. Well, if she tried to run from me I probably would have just rammed her in the legs with the car. Put her in the trunk.”

“Ah. About the trunk.”

Will peels away from his husband and fixes him with a withering look “Is this the other half of the arm that was in the glovebox? Or is it the donor of your little surprise? I wish you would stop eating in the car.”

“It’s only half a limb, dear. Nothing to worry yourself about. She is trying your phone.”

He waves his hand dismissively “Let her. It’s locked anyway. Though it does raise an important issue. How are we going to get her out of there without getting clawed to shreds? I saw her nails. The girls are all following this fashion of growing their nails to be about two inches long and curved like sickles. She could have an eye out of one of us, if we’re not careful.”

“Then I assure you I will be very careful.” Hannibal produces a coil of rough rope from one of his deep pockets “If a wild stallion rampages through your neighbourhood, what can you do to save yourself and your community if not break it?”

“Call the glue factory?” suggests Will lightly.

“Ah, but she has your phone.”

The girl flies into fresh hysterics when she sees Hannibal coming. Will’s keys chirp as the doors are all  
unlocked at once. Immediately, Susan seizes the handle of the passenger door where she is still sitting and tries to hold Hannibal back. He feints, by reaching for the corresponding back door. Her damaged hand shoots out to grab ahold of that handle too, and Hannibal wrenches the first door open.  
He drags Susan out by the legs and wrangles her with all the skill and finesse of a man who is accustomed to breaking wild, rampaging stallions. Will pops the hood for him and Hannibal dumps the bound girl in the roomy trunk. 

He then gets into the passenger seat “Thank you. I realise this is not how you would prefer to spend the night, after a challenging day at work.” he closes his hand over Will’s as he changes gears “With more work.”

“Believe me, it is my genuine pleasure.”

Again, he smiles “But it is also unfair to you. I will put her in the freezer for the night, then address the problem in the morning. That way I will have the whole weekend to work at my leisure.”

“You sure?”

There is a muffled wail from the trunk.

“I am certain.”

The car begins to back down the service road.  
Will glances over his shoulder, making sure the way is clear “What exactly was her transgression again? They’re all blurring together into one bleached, high-pitched ringing noise in my ears at this point. Prostituting her friends?”

“No. We have yet to visit Roman.”

“Roman…oh, yes, the boy whose parents own the convenience store? Mr and Mrs Wallender. And she’s not the one heading up the drug cartel at the high-school either. I must be getting old.”

“Why do you say that?”

The car straightens out onto the main road and sets off at a steady clip.  
“I can’t begin to separate these girls, like I said. My brain is shot. My memory is going.”

“There is nothing wrong with your mind,” says Hannibal rather tartly- the tone that he takes when defending a favoured artist of his against some harsh criticism “Give yourself some credit. It is nine in the evening and you have had little in the way of time to relax or catch your breath. It will come to you.”

“So you’re going to let me flounder? No, no, don’t answer that with some witticism about sharks or drowning. I’ll think of it in a moment.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a harpooned whale, but very well.”

By the time the lights of their house draws into view, Will has dredged up the detail from the exhaustion-induced fogs sitting on his memory banks.

“She’s a murderer too, isn’t she? The one who dumped the body of that child underneath the bridge in the park.”

Hannibal nods and opens the car door for Will, who stumbles out practically into his husband’s arms. After a long day of work, his limbs are not entirely willing to cooperate.  
Noting this, Hannibal ignores the screams issuing from the trunk and guides Will up to the front door.

“How did you figure it was her?”

“You remember the profile you made this Tuesday?”

“Wasn’t I half asleep?”

“Yes, but you were still completely right. I merely deduced from the start that you had given me and arrived at an obvious conclusion.”

“And you acted without solid evidence?”

“No, of course not. She had the child’s clothes under her bed. You remember that the corpse turned up-”

“Stark naked, yes. Arranged in foetal position. Either a symbol of jealousy over a maternal loss, or scorn for the concept of maternal instincts as a whole.” Will pauses as he crosses the threshold to listen for the familiar thunder of the dogs.

They barrel down the stairs, without a care that they might scratch the polished floorboards or scuff the carpets, or damage Hannibal’s careful house-keeping in some other insidious way. The two of them run circles around Will’s legs and whine with excitement as they are petted.  
When Susan lets out a fresh scream from the trunk, the larger of the two, a Shepherd called Actaeon, tears off to investigate. The Shiba Inu called Girl charges off in pursuit. Both of them bark with a renewed aggression. 

The dogs always get riled up when there’s a stranger on the property, regardless of whether they have arrived with Hannibal, in the trunk of one of the two cars or in some similar way, or if it’s just a hunter who has strayed a little far on a hunting trip, into the territory of two predators they cannot begin to fathom.

Will watches with interest as his dogs take up sentry positions on either side of the car and bark viciously. The girl inside must think they’re going to be set on her (which they may be, since Hannibal’s larder is still full for the month), because she breaks off into sobs which are nearly as cacophonous as the screams were.

“Which one was it?”

“The scorn. I’m afraid I couldn’t resist the temptation for a friendly chat when she discovered me in her house.”

“What did you tie her to?”

“A bedpost, but I doubt that she remembers it. I had to drug her to loosen her tongue in the first place. As it turns out, her step-father may be of interest to me as well.”

Will winces “Good God, that’s disgusting. If you don’t go for him, I may do it myself.”

“I would shudder to think of putting a single piece of a man of his…proclivities, into my digestive system. He’s all yours. It is a shame, though, to think that the girl might have held down her darkness had her step-father’s unwanted attentions not catalysed her metamorphosis.”

Hannibal pulls the rope taught between his fists, stretching out a length that will be suitable for encircling a pair of thin, struggling arms. Will watches him leave the porch, rubbing his aching temples. He’s going to need to turn in early, as much as it pains him to lose a night with Hannibal. Oh well. He will be there when Will wakes up, anyway. Rare is the morning or the night that he is not there when Will wakes and reaches for him.

 

By the time Hannibal has finished the necessary processes to keep the girl tied down in the freezer for the night, and shut the dogs up in the house and checked the locks on most windows and doors, Will is already sacked out on the bed. Mercifully, not in his work clothes. He at least found the time to change into something suited to sleeping, but has flung himself over the covers at such an angle that, no matter where Hannibal chooses to lay his head, unless he re-arranges Will he will have an arm or a leg lying across his throat.

Gently, he manoeuvres Will underneath the covers and pulls it up to his chin. Will immediately turns onto his side and pulls a pillow over his head.

He is completely unconscious, but speaks to Hannibal anyway “Has Jack called yet?”

Dimming the lights for Will’s sake, Hannibal begins to undress “Jack recently celebrated the death of the greatest enemy and friend he ever had, respectively. I believe this was our fourth anniversary of death?”

Will mutters something incoherent. His thought-process is completely incoherent right now- he is not even aware that he is speaking.

“Will?”

“What? I’m asleep.”

“Alright, if you say so.”

“I am.”

Hannibal finds it endearing and confusing in equal measures when Will talks in his sleep. The things that come out of his mouth are of two opposite ends of a spectrum; startlingly insightful, or utterly nonsensical. The states of waking dreams tend to last for two or so minutes, and can quickly turn dark and violent to Will’s mind if he happens to be discussing or recalling one of his many traumas. 

Unlike Hannibal, Will has only buried what disturbs him in shallow graves. If his nightmares so wish, they can reach up through the dirt and clasp his ankles at any time in the waking world.  
Tonight does not seem like a night for this concern, though, as Will is more focussed on convincing Hannibal that he is asleep than he is reliving a nightmare or offering a deep wisdom on the meaning of suffering.

When Hannibal gets into bed, Will recoils from his touch.

“Don’t.”

“Alright.”

“I’m married.”

“Yes, Will, to me.”

Suspiciously, Will lifts the corner of the pillow and peers at him with sleepy eyes “Hannibal, when did you get here? Where’s Alana?”

“Alana is in her safe-house in the Alps.”

“She was trying to get in bed with me.”

“Don’t worry. I saw her off. She will menace you no more.”

The pillow drops “Completely inappropriate. I don’t know what she wanted. She’s married too.”

Again, Hannibal reaches for him. In the short time since he last spoke, Will has actually managed to drop off all the way into sleep, so he doesn’t protest. Turning the lights out, Hannibal tucks an arm around his husband’s waist. Out of habit, his hand slips underneath Will’s shirt and settles so that it cups the scar on his stomach. The ‘smile’.

Officially, it is the second to last serious scar that Hannibal ever gave to him. The incident with the buzz-saw has become something of an inside joke. When Will is asked about the scar on his forehead, he changes his story each time. Each one is outlandish and ridiculous, but told with such an earnest attitude, and a genuine touch of pain at the memory, that the audience cannot help believe it. It is all nonsense, of course. 

 

Will sometimes enjoys playing different roles a little too much, for one who used to be as shy and awkward as he was. He is still in some ways very much the same introverted person that Hannibal happened upon at the beginning of their relationship, but time and practice has polished his acting skills. To the point that Hannibal will occasionally find himself surprised by the man he poses with, wondering where in the hell his husband has gone and who this suave stranger he left in his place could possibly be.

Like Will’s sleep-talking and sleep-walking, Hannibal finds it in equal measures disconcerting and charming. Mostly charming.

He’s about to drift on with a slight smile on his lips as he thinks about this when the phone- the  
obnoxious, ever-ringing instrument that his job requires him to have on and charged at all times- disrupts his sleep.

He catches it quickly, in case it wakes Will up.

“Hello?”

“Dr Faust?”

Hannibal swallows a growl of frustration “It is very late, Mira. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

The woman on the other end of the line, his over-friendly secretary, does not have the wit about her at this time of the night, nor most other times, to notice the slight, steely edge to his voice “Terrible news, Dr Faust! Not my news, of course, but I thought you might like to know-”

“Perhaps at a more decent hour.”

“Oh, am I interrupting something?”

Oh, how he wishes he could just let loose and seethe at her -that, yes, given the hour she chose to call at it is practically impossible that she is not interrupting something, and she is very lucky that she is not interrupting something far more intimate than spooning.

“No,” he lets out a small sigh, defeated “I have a feeling that this is a conversation I would rather have in the daylight.”

“Hmm…well, listen, doctor, there’s been another murder. By that cult, that horrible cult that left the little child dead under the bridge, you know?”

“Ah.”

Right, the cult. Of course they have been taking the credit for the majority of the crimes in this area since they alerted the local media of their presence. Many of Hannibal’s disappearances too: they are happy as clams to claim these, perhaps, all the while pondering exactly which one of their friends or families it is that plucks one of the weak-willed and sinful out of the community every now and then. Like a shrike, coloured as the background so as to blend in seamlessly.

They have also been covering for many of the rash of new murderers that have been encouraged by this cult activity. The murder of the child and subsequent dumping under the bridge is just one of the several that the cult has claimed, which does little to stymie Hannibal and Will from discovering who the true culprit is. But it does make it a bitch to disappear someone, these days. The whole town is on red-alert for suspicious activity, to the point that calls like these at eleven in the night have become commonplace. All in the name of the exchange of rumours and speculation.  
Hannibal straightens up and shifts away from Will, so as not to bother him from sleep with the talk.

“What do you think about that?” says Mira as triumphantly as if the murder her gossip concerns was her own “I told you they would be striking again soon.”

“I do not recall disagreeing with you, Mira.”

She giggles. Hannibal reflects on what a challenge it must be to the female gender to continue the struggle for equality, with representatives like these who giggle breathily like school-girls rather than recognising a challenge or an insult.

She giggles a little more, as if to prove the point “Oh, it is terrible though, isn’t it? The poor people the cult goes after. They’re just awful, you know, the way they’re left. This latest one? Had his head sawn completely off, and by his girlfriend! Another couple murder. Like Romeo and Juliet.”

He can imagine her clapping a hand to her small bosom- the perfect gesture to accompany the sigh she lets out.

“Did she survive? The girl?”

“No, no, they shot her in the head. The very moment she was done, I bet! Don’t you think it’s just awful, the way they make couples torture each other before they kill them?”

“I was under the impression that they were more fond of simply torturing the couple themselves while they faced each other.”

“It’s almost like a fad, this new murder! I heard that it was the second time they made a couple kill each other, though, can you imagine?”

“You are right,” says Hannibal flatly “It is terrible.”

He glances over at Will and rubs his husband’s shoulder absently.

“And it’s always the sweetest couples. The beautiful ones. Have you noticed?”

“I was not looking into that particular correlation, no.”

“Mike and Sarah were such a cute couple,” she pauses, with a rustle of fabric in the background “I’m looking at them right now.”

Hannibal knows exactly what she is doing. Mira is peering through the folds of those purple curtains in her front room that look more like props stolen from a Greek tragedy than they do a design accessory. She’s watching the constabulary buzz around the site of the murder victims, who will have been posed like pieces of trash that have missed the bins. The cult is fond of leaving their victims in main roads, or in the sight of schools, or in a public park. Once, scattered on the steps of the library. Anywhere they can be easily seen. 

 

There’s something primal about their methods- ungraceful, sloppy, but careful and measured at the same time. The work of an amateur that imagines themselves as the next Van Gogh or Beethoven. An angry Tchaikovsky whose notes fall on deaf or uninterested ears. A starving Picasso, using cardboard for want of a better material.

Mira is, of course, following the stories avidly in the papers.

When she is not glued to one of those trashy romance novels that makes Hannibal’s stomach churn to look at (the men on the covers are in costume, and their swooning, inevitably female partners are like foam and plastic), she is leafing through the papers or following the stories online. Hannibal often walks in on her when she is supposed to be working and sees her changing tabs quickly, from the Tattler or some other online-rag to the appropriate documents.

He marvels at the blindness of the people he is surrounded by, sometimes. They talk about Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham here and never for a moment pause to think, to really think, then recognise the faces in front of them.

One of them is curating their art museum. Another works in a repair shop, and can sometimes be called upon, thanks to his extensive qualifications, to substitute a psychology class at the local community college.

Mira is buzzing to chat about murderers to a serial murderer, one of the biggest of the last hundred years, and she has no idea. This would be pleasing to him if it weren’t so late, and if the subject material hadn’t been exhausted already. He must find a polite way to end the conversation before she can really get going.

“I look forward to hearing the gritty details tomorrow,” he says “Take care to look after your health, Mira. Don’t stay up too late.”

“Oh, I’ll be into work on time. Don’t worry about that…do you think they would mind if I went out and took some pictures? Only, my sister in Connecticut is never going to believe there were dead bodies posed right outside my door unless I send her some pictures.”

“If you are sneaky, then I’m sure they won’t mind or notice.”  
“Right, ok. Keep your fingers crossed.”

“Good night, Mira.”

“Good night Doctor Faust- oh, and say hello to Mark for me.”

She hangs up. Hannibal tosses his phone into a chair by the bed and sinks back to the mattress.

“I’m going to eat that woman.” 

“I want a drumstick.” mutters Will, still half-asleep.


	2. And small town voices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A host of random characters with no discernible features but names and chips in their shoulders? Seemingly in place for no reason but to further the plot and give us some idea of the hacky-slashy-weirdoes that we're dealing with?  
> No, there is some relevance. I promise.

The next day, the murders are all anyone wants to talk about.

They pool in the halls at Will’s school and exchange theories in whispers, making a clogged mess out of the school in between lesson changes. They are high-school students, and as neither had an elder sibling there are only a select few children of family friends to feel the grief more keenly than as a scintillating subject for the next session of scary-story telling around a guttering campfire. 

They stage a lively discussion- a flock of bleach blonde secretaries with long painted nails, fingers that flash with rings and an almost identically high-pitched laugh- outside of Hannibal’s office, while he is trying to get an academic paper proof-read. As his submissions to various journals across the academic world continue, he has had to work hard to change his style of narration to ensure that he is not discovered. This takes quite a bit of focus, to forge another internal dialogue from the one he is accustomed to employing and has been employing over many years, and the chattering of the secretaries outside is almost making it an impossibility.

While Will is attempting to quiet his class down and get everyone to the appropriate seats, Hannibal is wishing he could dash out of his office with a broom from the closet or the long-stemmed lamp he uses to read by when it grows dark and scatter the secretaries, like a flock of gabbling birds.

“Since no one else seems to be able to talk about anything else, why don’t we talk about the murders?” suggests Will, settling himself in the centre of the class.

One of the roles he has assumed in this new life is that of a confident, if a little distant part-time teacher. His students respect him and look forward to his occasional appearance and insight far more than they do the regular teacher, to the point that it is not unusual for them to call him for help. It is an unconventional arrangement, but small towns are good at making those and making those arrangements work. Will’s fair salary from the repair shop is supplemented by a paltry, but well-meaning addition from the community college. They could easily live off Hannibal’s salary alone, but there was an unspoken and mutual understanding between them that they would have to have their own spheres of existence in a workplace outside the house.

In spite of himself, Will misses the lab. He misses the chatty morticians and the buzz of a group crowded around a body. His classes provide a poor, but welcome substitute. All eyes are on him again, which he doesn’t exactly enjoy, but he does appreciate the reminder of the days in the lab before his entire world was turned upside-down.

“Now, considering that it happened just last night I think it would be in incredibly poor taste to put up a picture of the crimes. You will all have seen them splashed across the papers anyway. Let’s take a moment to orient ourselves. What are the first impressions of a murder like this?”

A forest of hands shoots up. Each one of them are desperate to make eye-contact, to make him understand how badly they need to express their opinion.

Will takes a second to remind himself that he is in control of the classroom and it shouldn’t matter if those who he doesn’t pick first are pissed at him. He can come back to them later. Also, it’s important not to show favouritism. God, he hates teaching moments like this. More than anything he hates teaching anxiety, but what can he do about it except roll with the moment?

Will picks a sweater-vested, bespectacled boy in the front whose arm is about to pop out of the joint in his effort to be recognised “Mr Johansson.”

Half of the hands go down when he is picked. Sven Johansson isn’t one to relinquish the spotlight easily when he gets himself in it.

“I think,” he says emphatically, like a preacher will begin a sermon “That this is obviously a crime motivated by incredible pent-up sexual frustration.”

Will jumps in as he’s getting geared up “Sexual or romantic?” he needs to steer the conversation, or it could go anywhere. It’s amazing how often the students end up arguing the semantics of religion.

“Romantic, obviously,” says Johansson “The cult that is doing this targets couples that were outwardly romantically successful, and from the way they make the couples hurt each other or watch each other being hurt before death, I would say that they’re being punished for romantic success. So that means that the aggressors must be in some way disappointed with their romantic lives. They’re all probably sexual failures.”

A girl sitting opposite the packed room from him clears her throat “I think that’s a ridiculous generalisation.”

Will turns, glad that someone has taken the ball out of Johansson’s court so he doesn’t have to “Care to develop that, Ms Acharya?”

She flicks her long hair- uncut in the entire time Will has known her, and spins a pen between her fingers. Her eyes are trained directly on Johansson with an expression of measured distaste. Will does not think it would be a stretch to guess that the two of them experienced some kind of romantic or sexual failure in the near-past.

“I think that some of them must be sexually and romantically inexperienced. This is their way of exploring what has been a sphere of existence that has been cut off from them for most of their adolescence- and we can assume that these are like a coming-of-age ceremony, since it’s a group doing them.”

“So you’re thinking this is like a murder club?” asks Will.

It takes some effort to keep a wry smile off his face. It’s a loaded concept, but sounds far less intimate than ‘murder husbands’ ever will.

“Yes, definitely.”

Johansson clears his throat “She’s…she’s right. They must be uniting around their sexual failures then.”

“And why do you think that these individuals have chosen to unite around a common hatred of those who are romantically successful, rather than indulging in some romantic success with each other?”

The class titters.

“I’d say they all have crippling self-esteem issues,” suggests a blonde girl called Callie Jones, whose contributions tend to be as shallow as the stereotypes surrounding her hair colour would suggest. Except today, she seems to be in rare, lucid form “I mean, it’d totally make so much more sense to just pick someone that feels a similar way to you and to capitalise off that and like, just totally go for it. But there’s something stopping them, right? So either they’re, like, long-time friends with no room for romance in their long-time relationships, or they all think they’re secretly Quasimodo.”

Again, a giggle shivers through the classroom.

Noticing that Lakshmi Acharya is glowering at Callie Jones, Will decides to move the discussion along before it can turn violent.

“So, taking that suggestion into consideration, we have the profile of what sounds like a typical teenaged virgin. Now we can either assume that they are high-school aged because they are attacking couples they would have a chance to observe in school, or that some, if not all, are at a university level and have attacked only high-school students so far because they feel in a better position to do so. Which one is it?”

Again, a forest of hands.

Will wishes he were at home, or had a good excuse to crawl under his desk and tell them all to fuck off.

 

Meanwhile, Hannibal is growing more and more irritated with the flapping secretaries. Again, he has to wonder what the Suffragettes of the earliest part of the last century would say if they could see what the struggle for equal job opportunities has wrought. Copies of glossy Cosmopolitans tucked into designer purses. Nails that should be classed as weapons, and look like they have already been used as such when painted red. Colours at the roots in combat with colours at the tips.

Normally, Hannibal has a higher tolerance for other people’s bullshit. He can sit through it all with a calm expression, a polite demeanour, never letting on how much he would enjoy respond to their violence against common sense and manners with a more literal example of violence.

But today? He’s on a short leash today, for some reason. It may have something to do with Mira’s call last night, or it may not be in such a large part. He can’t decide what is bothering him, nor how he is going to allow it to affect his behaviour. All he knows at this point is that hearing Will’s voice would probably resolve the shakiness of his mood in some way, and that it is hard to predict for himself what Will would say if he did call, with the cackles of the hens outside.

When they finally disperse, called away by their various tasks and similarly disgruntled bosses, Mira pops her head around the door.

She smiles broadly “Have you seen the article in the paper yet?”

For evidence, Hannibal shows her the copy of the local rag on his desk “Yes, I have. Quite a gruesome picture they showed.”

Mira’s grin grows wider “That’s one I took, you know. I sneaked outside with my camera and got a few good ones from behind my azaleas.”

It is no stretch of Hannibal’s imagination to see his secretary hunched in a sheer bath-robe, brandishing a camera at the tragedy “Oh, really?”

 

She nods proudly “The reporters couldn’t get close enough to take their own pictures, and they all arrived a little too late for the best stuff anyway. So, while they were complaining about it, I just walked right over and sold a few of mine to them.”

“How industrious.”

“Thank you. Oh, here, this is about that incoming exhibit. The one about mourning the Dragon?”

At the sound of the name, an involuntary prickle of either fear or irritation travels up Hannibal’s spine. He still cannot hear the name without seeing that knife slamming into Will’s face. Or, remembering only a few moments later, when Will pulled them from the cliff to evade the enemies that Hannibal hadn’t even been aware were creeping towards them.

She offers him a file. Hannibal takes it gingerly, as if it might bite him.

He flips the folder open and finds himself confronted by the familiar image of the roaring Dragon, and the woman prone at his feet. 

“Thank you, Mira.”

She nods “No problem, Doctor. I’ll be coming by in about half an hour with your nine-thirty appointment.”

“I will endeavour to have this read and finished by that time.”

Mira retreats and closes the door behind her, shutting out the noise. After a moment has passed, Hannibal gets up and draws the blinds so he doesn’t have to see it if another clot of secretaries gathers in the main hall of the museum. Or of interns. Or professors. Or other members of staff. 

They’re all gossips, one way or another.

He begins to leaf through the file on the upcoming event. It is called ‘Mourning the Dragon’ in reference, of course, to the piece of fine art that Francis Dolarhyde devoured in his delusional state. 

Contemporary fine artists ( a phrase which still makes Hannibal want to weep for what the world is coming to) from all across the world started a movement, involving the other spheres of the art world until this movement came about.  
They have created paintings, collages and other things to celebrate the dragon. Most of them involve some kind of condemnation of the murderer. The art pieces that Hannibal has come into contact seem to be more devoted to mourning the Dragon himself, rather than Francis Dolarhyde’s victims. He has seen one, though, where the Dragon was accurately represented in his appropriate form and stance, but where the face of the screaming woman clothed in sun had changed into Dolarhyde in a motorcycle fetish get-up. He had to take a picture of that one and text it to Will. 

As the curator of the art museum, he and his husband will be expected to attend. What little social elite this town has to offer (a surprising amount, considering the population can’t be much larger than 5500 or 6000) will be turning up on the night, and this includes the local bohemians and business proprietors. While Hannibal will relish the chance to show Will off, he is not sure if the effect will be the same if they are surrounded by paintings in homage to the original that was nearly the death of them both.

Then again, the Dragon did ultimately bring them together, and Will insists that they need to go for the sake of Hannibal’s social responsibilities.

Their main concern is that the interest in the Dragon will bring about an interest in them. For some reason, the FBI has chosen to pull every single image of Will Graham and Hannibal Lector from usage in the media that they can- Hannibal expects it has something to do with wanting to hunt them in a media darkness, so that they will be caught unawares when they are ultimately caught. Whatever the reason, it has meant that their faces have gone largely unremembered. They should be safe, but the night will still be tense.

Whoever threw the file together slipped in a picture of Dolarhyde. For what reason, Hannibal does not know, but he spears the picture through the forehead on a pencil lead and holds it up to the light, contemplating it.

He addresses the picture “In death, you are not so fierce. They do not fear you as a dragon. They mock you as a pixie that thought too much of himself. They have misremembered you. You were not entirely as impressive as you imagined, my friend, but there was still something undeniably feral about you. I am sorry they will not remember that.”

Hannibal then plucks his pencil free and tears the photo in half, splitting the glowering face exactly down the middle.

“It is a fate that you have earned, I’m sure. To go down in history ridiculed. Reduced to a freak-show attraction.”

He crumples up the halves of the photo and tosses them into the trash. Then he pushes the matter to the back of his mind and concentrates on the portraiture in front of him.

 

A few blocks away, the classroom’s discussion has heated up.

“What Mr Collins is trying to suggest, Ms Maleny, is that the aggressors are being led by one charismatic figurehead.”

The girl in the front row swivels to frown at her challenger in the third row “Well, yeah, obviously, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to assign all the blame to this individual. The members of the cult are mature enough to experience sexual frustration and violent urges, so I’d assume that they’re also mature enough to be making their own decisions.”

Tyrone Collins scoffs “There are plenty of individuals who are mature enough to experience sexual frustration without first experiencing the capacity to take responsibility for their own actions. In fact, I’d say that’s the majority of my gender at this age.”

Enlightened a crowd as they are, the men of the class laugh along with the women.

“Ok, but we’re talking about a different species of male. A different species of person. These are people who kill and then return to their lives pretending that they didn’t. That takes some acceptance of responsibility, right? On the surface, these people have to behave like it doesn’t bother them.”

“So will a child psychopath, after they murder their first small animal in their parents’ backyard. Children are defined by their lack of maturity-”

“And here I was thinking it was age.” snipes Johansson, trying to inject himself into the conversation.

Tyrone progresses as if he has heard nothing “Being mentally childish doesn’t have to mean being mentally disabled in some way. It just means that you’re not accepting your responsibility, and then progressing without remorse. So what I’m saying is that, in terms of capacity for remorse and maturity, these people are children. That means that it’s only gonna be easier for them to want to punish the romantically successful. It’s a kid’s mentality.”

Marlene Maleny opens her mouth to respond, but Will steers the conversation elsewhere “Alright, now let’s discuss the couples. Why at this point do we think that only young couples are being targeted, when older-age couples who have experienced longer periods of success and satisfaction with each other’s company would make more sense?”

Someone raises their hand at the back row- a kid called Takeshi “Because the cult are themselves young, so are obsessed with the idea of youth?”

“Fair idea. Anything else?”

Another hand goes up at the back “Because the cult is composed of sexually unsuccessful adults and they’re punishing the youth for their success?”

Will watches as Lakshmi Acharya scribbles something in her notebook with an expression that is trying, unsuccessfully, not to be sour. Thankfully, she doesn’t protest.

The kid at the back continues “I mean, if that’s the case, then there must be some self-esteem issues in the way because there’s been so sexual violence so far. Except for the mutilation of genitals. That seems to suggest some kind of sexual deformity among the cult members.”

“Because the cult is punishing the sexually virile?” suggests Marlene Maleny.

“No, I was thinking because the wounds have all been self-inflicted, right Dr Columbus?”

Will nods “So you’re suggesting that humiliation is playing a role in the killers’ patterns.”  
“Humiliation and torture. They make the halves of the couples humiliate themselves to test how deep the relationship runs, right?”

“It is true that they have always found more self-inflicted wounds on the couples that have been more brutally treated, yes.”

Callie Jones puts her hand up “Excuse me, can I say something about the point about not going for old couples?”

“Sure, Ms Jones. Fire away.”

“Maybe the figurehead of the cult are an old couple and they’re, like, punishing younger couples for thinking they’re in love so early in their lives.”

Will nods “Another fair idea. This is an interesting profile that we’re building.”

Lakshmi Acharya puts her hand up “What kind of people do you think the older couple would have to be to attract the attentions of the cult, Dr Columbus?”

Will has been mulling this over himself. Mostly out of concern that one or two of the cult members are fans of his husband and plan to target them at some point in the future. Last year, there was a few tense weeks where an aspiring murderer happened upon them on a public street and stalked them relentlessly in hopes of ‘freeing’ Hannibal from the shackles of his marriage to kill again.  
Will answered that wacko’s concern about Hannibal getting enough killing done by demonstrating how willing he is, as Hannibal’s spouse, to tolerate the hobby. Encourage, even.

“To attract the attentions of this cult? A cult which, as we have said, is punishing those romantically successful, those that they identify with and are refusing to take responsibility for their actions? I think it would indicate a shift in the mentality of the cult if they were to attack an older couple. The couple would have to include at least one person that each member of the group holds in an incredibly high esteem.”

“So, someone they look up to?” asks Lakshmi Acharya “And would they be punishing the couple for being like that, um, romantically successful?”

“If this cult is comprised of only young people as the majority of the class seems to think, then they would most likely be punishing the couple for fitting so well on the pedestal that their esteems have put them on.”

A tense moment of quiet follows this. It would be silence, but the students are whispering among each other and shuffling a lot, trying to make themselves comfortable in their seats again.

It is Johansson who breaks the silence “How is Dr Faust?”

“He’s fine. Far out of the reach of the cult, I’m sure.”

They laugh, nervously.


	3. Doe and Crawford

Jack Crawford is just getting ready to turn in for the night when there is a knock at the door. A crisp, quick, professional kind of knock that he recognises as the knock of some kind of agent of government investigation. Not a police officer, but something like that.

So it doesn’t surprise him that, when he opens the door, he finds a well-dressed young woman with a neat bun and a black car behind her, parked in his driveway, and a thick file under her arm. The glossy corners of several photos stick out of the papers in her files, and she stands tall, if somewhat nervously. She is very tall, in fact. Taller than Jack and still wearing heeled shoes to supplement her height.

The woman looks him up and down and casts a more keenly anxious glance at the dog in the hallway.

Jack glances over his shoulder “Oh, Winston? Don’t mind him. He doesn’t bite, but if you don’t like being licked then I can get him upstairs.”

She swallows hard, but relaxes visibly “Mr Crawford, I’m with the FBI. I expect they called to tell you I was coming?”

He shakes his head “They did not.”

“Oh. Uh, then I can come back later. I’m sorry, there must have been some kind of mistake with the-”

Jack extends a calloused, scarred hand “Why don’t you let me see the file, then we can decide if you should leave.”

Her heels make a familiar, almost crustacean noise on the floorboards as she follows him in. It reminds him of Bella, but not painfully. Most of his memories of her have become such that he can only view them through a lens of absolute fondness. Jack has given up entirely on the idea of re-marrying- not that it held much attraction to him before. He is simply never going to be as interested or committed to another woman as he was Bella, so he is left to move on as best he can. 

Occasionally, he gets pushed back by sounds like these. It helps that the woman is absolutely looming over him, far taller than Bella ever was, so he doesn’t have to worry about mistaking her for his late wife for even a second.

“Mr Crawford, I realise this must be very intrusive and irregular.”

“Intrusive, yes, but not irregular.”

Winston falls in step at Jack’s side. He doesn’t yet acknowledge their visitor and probably won’t until she’s sitting in Jack’s living room, in some position that ensures if he gets up on her lap that he’ll have her pinned there to shed on her designer suits as much as he pleases.

“Mr Crawford, I think I should tell you something before you invite me into your home.”

Jack turns around so that they are stopped in the threshold to the kitchen “Are you a murderer?”

“Pardon?”

 

“If you’re concerned that I am concerned I have just invited an agent into my home that I have never met before claiming to be FBI, and you’re worried that I think you’re some kind of murderer and I’m going to attack you the second I can get my hands on something sharp, then don’t be. I know an agent when I see one.”

Her face loosens with shock “Uh, actually…my name is Tahcawin Walker. I’m Miriam Lass’s niece.”

Jack looks her up and down “Aren’t you a little old to be making that claim?”

Tahcawin Walker’s fingers twist together over her file “Her brother was much older than her. I was born only a few years after she was. We both happen to be in the FBI by a coincidence…my father disowned the family. His father didn’t much like the idea of his oldest son marrying a Lakota, so-”

“May I see your badge?”

She takes it out of her pocket, her face clouding as if she is cursing herself for removing it in the first place, which she must have done in the heat of a nervous moment, and hands it over to Jack.  
Her ID photo is not the most flattering. The lighting makes her photo look more like a mugshot, but then, Jack would never trust anyone who is photogenic in their ID. Beverly Katz looked like a serial murderer in hers, and Will Graham seemed to be holding a flashlight under his jaw in his photo.

“How is Miriam?”

Tahcawin shifts her weight nervously “I’m not sure. She isn’t taking visitors anymore.”

Jack wishes she had invented something. A throw-away lie to ease his guilt and his concern. He does not often think of Miriam Lass anymore. When possible, he tries to put the entire affair from the very start of the Chesapeake Ripper’s case to the very end, when Will and Hannibal threw themselves from a cliff as the FBI rolled into the scene of the Dragon’s death. The whole chain of events has cast a pall on his life, but is one which he can escape for a few days at a time with distractions.

Seems like this woman, Tahcawin Walker, is about to drown him in it again. And yet, for some reason, Jack finds himself unable to turn her away. Something about the way she carries the file, like she’s carrying a shield into battle. The way she walks, like she’s stepping on eggshells. Whatever she has in her file has scared her, butchered her perception of the way in which life works and people behave.

Jack can’t turn that away.

“Should we talk in the kitchen or the living room?”

Glancing over the immaculate, chrome surfaces of the kitchen, Tahcawin seems comforted. It must look like a lab to her. That is the way it looks to Jack. When he’s preparing his meals on the kitchen island, he often is surprised at the back of his mind that he’s cutting up vegetables, rather than a body. He only ever cuts vegetables now, or tofu. He hasn’t had any meat since he watched Hannibal go for Will’s forehead with a hacksaw. For some reason, that kind of put him off of the idea of a carnivorous diet entirely.

“This is fine.”

“Please,” he gestures to the table “Sit down.”

If Tahcawin is surprised that Jack doesn’t mind her spreading out a file about what are surely gruesome murders on the place where he eats, then she doesn’t show it.

“What are they calling this one?”

“They didn’t need to invent a name,” she waits to sit down until Jack has, and then she seems a little too large for the chair and the table “This is a cult that is doing the killings, and they have named themselves.”

Spinning the file around, she opens the folder and points to the name at the top of the paper with an unpainted nail.

“The Hand of Jophiel.” reads Jack “Sounds like the name of a Judeo-Christian angel. You’ll have to help me here, Ms Walker, I haven’t been to church in a long time.”

“Jophiel is an angel that represents beauty in the Judeo-Christian texts. According to some of them, this is the angel that turfed Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. They also helped Michael do battle in the evil realm with the Devil.” she says all this with a slight, wry smile on her lips that tells Jack that he’s dealing with a long-time religious sceptic.

Fine by him. In his work, he has seen much more of the purported Devil than he has of the God that his parents assured him was very real.

“So we’re dealing with a cult that claims to represent Divine beauty. Are they arranging their victims beautifully?”

Tahcawin slides a photo out of the file and passes it to him “No, more often than not the victims are scattered in pieces.”

Jack takes a look at the photo. A young couple; two boys that couldn’t have been very far out of  
high-school if they are out of it at all “Are they only targeting gay couples?”

“Oh, no. There have been five couples killed so far, as well as a few lone murders, and two out of those five have been gay. I believe you’re looking at the second murder.”

“So it’s not a religious fanatic in the evangelical sense of the word.”

“Actually, the couple that you’re looking at right now were the first ones to be forced through self-punishment. We believe that the victims were told they could spare their partner some kind of torture by mutilating themselves. One of those boys…he willingly removed his own genitals for the sake of his partner, as far as we can tell.”

In spite of himself, Jack feels his stomach twist and his legs scissor shut “Was the other gay couple subjected to this?”

Tahcawin digs out a second photo. This one is of two girls, who are not in scattered pieces as their male counterparts were, but posed gracefully next to each other. Their hands, hacked to pieces with defensive wounds and missing many fingers, are almost reaching each other’s. Jack notes that the girls are both about the same age as the boys. 

“We’re dealing with high-school students here. Maybe not all of the cult are in high-school, but whoever committed the first murder knew those two boys.”

“What makes you say that?”

“There’s a kind of scorned lover mentality to it,” he taps the first photo “The pieces are mixed together, which suggests that to the murderers, the victims were inseparable. This arrangement is a defeat.”

Tahcawin cocks a slim eyebrow “Could you elaborate?”

Winston finally comes to sit at Jack’s feet and settles on top of his slippers. His tail thumps the ground lazily as Jack walks her through his thought process “The fact that self-mutilation was involved at all means that the murderers were trying to divide the couple. They were trying to prove it to them that the other one’s partner was not really as committed as they thought they were. They were going to prove this by having whichever boy it was balk and cave in the wake of demands that he self-mutilate to save his boyfriend. Only, when the boy went through with it, the cult had their point throw back in their faces. So they conceded defeat, but not graciously. They allow the boys to be together in death, but not in the same way that they allow these girls to be together. First, they have to hack them to pieces for defying their expectations.”

Tahcawin nods “I hadn’t thought of that. I was getting hung up over the notion that one of the cult must have been rejected by one of the boys at one point.”

“Hmm. Do you think that had something to do with their coming-out?”

“As a gay couple? I wouldn’t know. These murders are centralised in a small town, but the town isn’t a back-water or evangelical hick town. It’s much more progressive than you’d expect. As I understand it, the curator of their local art museum is a man with a long-time husband.”

Jack mulls over this “So we’re going to assume, for now, that there is no underlying homophobia in these murders?”

“If that were true, then I’m sure they would be going for a majority of gay couples rather than heterosexual.”

 

“Show me the rest.”

She does.

Jack leafs through reports on mutilations, beatings, the post-mortems, the accounts of grieving families and friends trying to make sense of who would do this and what has happened. All the while, his stomach clenches in a familiar sensation of dread. It doesn’t feel right to do this without them. There was only five or so months, two at minimum, where he had the kind of setting that he has missed ever since he lost it.

Zeller and Price, over-excited to tell him all of the interesting surprises they had found concealed in the bodies. Beverly wandering in with a coffee and a bright smile that did not suit the grim tasks she dealt with daily. Will and Hannibal staring at each other and trying not to be caught staring at each other. He often wonders, when he thinks back to those times, how long the two of them had been existing within the kind of mysterious understanding that caused Will to push not only Hannibal, but himself from the cliff the last time he saw them.

He misses them all, still. Even Hannibal and his penchant for dizzying metaphors and human flesh.

He never thought it would boil down to this. Him, sitting with a stranger at his kitchen table, with a dog on his feet and no one to look forward to welcoming home.

“They’re sending you out to investigate.”

“Yes.”

“And they want you to take me.”

Tahcawin bites her bottom lip “I was asked to extend an invitation, yes.”

“An invitation from Purnell, I’m guessing.”

“Yes.”

“Well that’s as good as an order.”

“Sir, you know you can turn her down. She’s not your boss anymore. Not really, since you’re retired now.”

Jack reaches under the table to scratch Winston between the ears “Ten young men and women are dead, plus two children. This job is not one that anyone has ever successfully retired from, Ms Walker. I’ll pack my bags and bring my dog, if you don’t mind.”

 

As with most days, Hannibal manages to get home before Will.

Will isn’t sure how he does it. His job is high-stress and busy, busy, busy with all manner of paper-pushing and placating of high-strung art dealers and collectors. But somehow, he has found a way to cut his day off at exactly 7 p.m. on most weekdays- sometimes, usually on Monday, they find ways to hold him back to 10 or later, and on said occasions Will usually crashes on the couch with the dogs (who are not technically allowed to sit on Hannibal’s tasteful furniture) until his husband makes it home.

The hour is now 8 p.m., and Will has had to deal with more than his fair share of gushing students. After that long debate in class, they had been chasing him down all day. He was supposed to be marking papers in the small office he and a few other substitutes take turns using, but they showed up right until 7 p.m., wanting to talk about term papers or discuss theories. One or two had recorded the entire class with the intention of turning it over to the local police. Will made no move to stop them.

He’ll let them play detective. On the off-chance that the police do take it seriously, there are not very many people in the world who know Will Graham by the sound of his voice alone.

He can’t imagine the tape making it into Jack’s hands, now that he’s been retired for so many years. 

Nor can he even begin to conceive what wild twist of fate there would have to be for the tape to somehow end up in Molly’s hands. She has given him up for dead, and Will has long since abandoned what little motivation he felt to return to her, to their dogs, their son and their marriage.  
Distraction therapy is the phrase that pops up into his head when he thinks of their two or so years together. It’s cruel and dismissive and infantilising, but close enough to the truth of the matter that 

Will feels little guilt when he thinks about it.

Since the dogs don’t bust out of the house to greet him, Will guesses they must be with Hannibal. Either helping him torment the girl that’s still getting un-made in their basement, or they’re burning her in the woods.

Will gets out of the car and a moment later, his legs are encircled by panting bundles of fur. The larger of the two, Actaeon, feints towards the woods, stopping every now and then to make sure that Girl and Will are following him. In the dark, Will makes out faintly a thin column of smoke rising from the woods. Hannibal must have had a good day, if he feels secure enough to be burning something and letting the smoke go. Normally, he dampens it in some way, usually by using green wood so there is no smoke. And anyway, it’s a dark night already. Only the flickering, muted light of the fire is visible at the moment.

Although he is sure the dogs have announced him obviously enough, Will makes sure to let Hannibal know it’s him. Startling Hannibal Lector while he’s burning a corpse at night is not an intelligent decision to make.

He stands by the side of what they have fondly dubbed ‘the pit’, for both the functionality of the name, and because it makes them both smile whenever they mention it in passing. The pit is an 8ft deep, 10 ft wide cement square in the ground. The walls are sheer and blood-stained, from the few times that someone has attempted to claw their way out and torn their nails to shreds in the process.

They did not build it and can only guess at what its original purpose was, but Hannibal likes it. He appreciates the fact that the pit is just deep enough so that a person can straighten up and strain, nearly feeling the air on their fingertips, which gives them hope and cause enough to try and try to get out until they are exhausted. No one has ever escaped from the pit successfully.  
Hannibal has covered up the smell of searing flesh by adding sage and other herbs to the mix.

Shielding his nose, Will stops at the opposite edge of the pit. The two of them stare at each other over the leaping embers and flames.

“I met a man from the exhibition today. An artist.”

“An artist, or an artiste?”

Hannibal smiles, making his face ghostly in the odd lighting. He stoops slightly to scratch Girl under the collar “I am certain that Mr Dorset thinks himself the greatest thing to happen to art since Van Gogh.”

“Which one is his contribution?”

“Have I shown you the one that depicts the Dragon falling in much the same way that we fell into the sea?”

“Hmm…was that the one that used an entirely blue pallet except for the Dragon?”

“One of the two, yes.”

“And you talked to him without him recognising your face?”

“Of course, dear. If he had recognised my face then I fear I would have had to cut our conversation short.”

Rubbing the back of his neck, Will loosens his tie and unzips his vest to lessen the heat of the fire 

“Well, what did he want from you?”

“Only my undivided attention for much longer than our appointment called for. I’m afraid I had to press the panic button to get Mira to escort him out.”

The ‘panic button’ is just Hannibal’s intercom. When it comes on during a meeting, it is alerting Mira that the meeting is going to go over-schedule unless she rescues him by seeing his audience out.

“So, things are still going well.”

“Yes, very well. And you’re still sure you would like to attend the opening night?”

“Social responsibility, Hannibal, yours and mine. Besides, there’s going to be a lot of wine there, right?”

Hannibal smiles “I take it you plan to pocket some bottles?”

Unabashed, Will nods. He hates shopping for wine, claiming that vintages are too confusing to be bothered with and that the wide array of brands are just in place to put inexperienced wine-drinkers at sea. Hannibal, for his part, has a select few vintages and brands that he will drink. Whenever he’s coordinating an event at the museum, it is assured that a few of his favourites will be floating around in the mix of proffered beverages. So, Will just swipes a few every now and then. He has never been caught and likely never will be. 

“As many as aren’t chained down.”

Will circles around the pit, glancing into it as he goes. The body there is little more than a blackened husk in a vaguely human shape- a human shape missing its legs, from the knee down.

“Did she struggle much?”

“Not much.”

“She gave up?”

“She fell unconscious.”

Will makes a face “Hmm. Not very sporting of her.”

“I was inclined to tell her that, but she did bear up under losing both legs very well.”

“She screamed the house down.”

“But she refrained from crying.”

Hannibal doesn’t hate crying so much, but he does hate the ugly criers. People whose faces scrunch up like crushed Styrofoam cups and turn red with the effort of expelling salt water from their ducts. People whose sobs are not clean and quick, but long and gasping and whimpering. It sets his teeth on edge. In Will’s experience, most practiced murderers have pet peeves that bother them during murders and can accelerate any process of torture before the final release. Ugly criers never last very long with Hannibal.

He wraps an arm around his husband’s shoulder and stares absently at the fire for a little while. His mind is abuzz with fears for the future, which are now well-founded, considering what he has been told in confidence today, by one of his students. On this land and in this place, specifically, under this man’s arm, they cannot really reach him. They become no more than minor annoyances once his home is in sight and the smell of burning death is heavy in the air, accented with sage and rosemary.

“The FBI are coming.”

“Ten victims, twelve if you count the two our friend here has committed. I am not surprised,”  
Hannibal rubs Will’s shoulder “Who told you of this?”

“One of my students. Her father is with the police, and she was determined to take our recording forward so they could use our profile.”

Hannibal chuckles “What a quaint notion. Which one is she?”

“Calliope Jones. You know, the-”

“The one who is utterly infatuated with you?”

“She sat in my office for twenty minutes after hours. Her neckline just kept getting lower and she found so many reasons to bend forward over my desk and sort of…plump her breasts up, into my face.”

The grip on Will tightens just a little bit- just enough to let Will know that, while it is fine with Hannibal that his young students make fools of themselves by falling at his feet, that Hannibal has no intention of giving him up. Or sharing him.

It makes Will smile, and want to tease him “She’s a sweet girl. She suggested that we go get coffee sometime to discuss her paper.”

“Did she ask you about raising her grades?” he cannot quite keep the sneer from his mouth “Did she make it clear just how much she was willing to do to get those grades up, or did she at least show that much restraint?”

“Actually, she was more interested in knowing what times of the week I was free. I told her that I was booked all week. Project at home, taking up all my time when I wasn’t at work.”

Hannibal relaxes a fraction “The project is burning right now. I’m afraid you told her a lie.”

“Then I’ll just waste my time on you. How does that sound?”

“Cloying and romantic.”

If there were a third party at the pit to catch the way they are looking at each other, they would certainly gag and ask them if they would mind taking the display to a room.

“Are you worried?” asks Hannibal.

“About Calliope Jones or the FBI?”

“About Calliope Jones and the FBI.”

“The agents won’t bother us if we don’t bother them. I’m sure they know our faces, but we’re good at hiding in plain sight by now. Besides, they’re looking for a cult. Not an art museum’s curator and his bookish husband. And if Calliope Jones gets too close for comfort? You can bite her.”

Hannibal smiles. Will smiles. The dogs circle the pit, anxious to get at the meat they smell burning, but far too wise to attempt to salvage anything from the curling corpse in the fires beneath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short note on names.  
> I'm going to assume that when the Murder Husbands drifted into this charming, liberal little berg, they did not have the energy nor time to devote to fiendishly clever aliases.  
> 'Columbus', because Will has discovered something that plenty of people were already aware was there- his capacity for violence.  
> 'Faust' because Hannibal is probably a fanboy for that guy's music, and just couldn't resist the slight jab at Will about this whole deal with the Devil he has entered.  
> On an even shorter side-note, Tahcawin is a traditional Lakota name that loosely translates to 'doe'


	4. A sheep in wolf's clothing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I took some time to fix the formatting errors. I have a little glitch in the programme I use to write on that means that the formatting messes up when I translate it over and after I upload, I'm usually so tired I don't have the energy in me to fix the formatting. But I finally got a long-weekend and thusly, the time to fix it. I hope the formatting hasn't annoyed the readership too much, but thank you to the people who remarked on it. That gave me the kick in the butt I needed to make the time to fix this.

(Several years earlier, at the bottom of the cliff)

If Will Graham makes one conscious decision as he falls, it is that he will not bother to resurface and try for the shore if he is not accompanied.  
At some point, Hannibal is of course torn away from him. Either by waves, or by the shock of the fall that leaves him breathless. Will has fallen from heights before. Once, when he was a school-child with scraped knees and patched clothes, he was pushed over a banister at his school and fell not quite the full height of one story, onto his back. The blow was cushioned in part by his back-pack and a scattering of tarps that the art-class had been using to ensure no paint got on the hall carpets while they worked during the previous lesson, but it was breathtakingly painful. 

There have been hundreds of painful experiences since, thanks to everything from knives that gutted him to hack-saws that made a steady, if hesitant progress for his skull and brain, but none quite so shocking as the fall. Except, perhaps, for this. Being unscathed but winded is an entirely different matter when one is weeping on one’s side on the linoleum floor of a school, than it is when one has sunk five feet into turbulent water, and one was horribly injured to begin with.  
His shoulder and cheek scream in pain. The whole of his body is abuzz, awash with too much information to process. He is not broken anywhere, nor does he have fresh cuts yet, but God, it still hurts. 

Acting on instinct alone to move, Will struggles up to the surface. His head breaks through the trough of a rearing wave, so he has to immediately duck again to avoid having his sinuses flooded with any additional salt water. Who knew that salt water on open wounds would be so fucking painful? He can hardly bear those particular seething sensations in his shoulder and cheek alone, and yet, he still has to find the strength to move his already cramping muscles and anchor himself to a rock. There are more than a handful of spires of rock down here. It is a small miracle that Will was not speared on them or dashed against them.  
He does his best to wipe his eyes and peers into the gloom to ensure that Hannibal has escaped this too. If his body was crushed on the rocks, it has already been washed away.

Again, Will is reminded of the small, but long-ignored epiphany that he finally gave attention to at the top of the cliff.  
It is a simple one: he wants to be with Hannibal.  
As a partner in crime; as a partner in life. He’s going to end up following that man for however many years more he can wrest away from fate and fortune. Except, maybe, given his choice on top of the cliff to just accept his corruption and move on with it, he won’t have to follow. He can be an equal. 

He can walk in stride.  
But that is only if Hannibal has survived and will accept him, after he pushed them from the cliff. Given Hannibal’s reaction when they fell, he hadn’t realised that it wasn’t just moonlight making the blood on them black. Headlights. Will watched over Hannibal’s shoulder as the FBI drew near, cornering them on the cliff. Either Will could feign innocence, making himself a victim of circumstance again, or he could make good on his hopes to just get away from it all.  
So he chose to fall. 

Looking to the top of the cliff, Will sees that the night sky is being broken up by a manner of lights. Some of them have even begun to pepper the dark water. Far away from him, though.  
He can’t hear them over the ringing in his ears, or the roar of the water against his cliff. So he trusts that they will not hear him.  
Will is going to call for Hannibal three times. If he does not come by the third call, then he is no longer there, or the cliff has made him tired of his pursuit and he’s given up on him. In either case, Will is going to let go of the rock and let the ocean take him where it so pleases.

A part of him expects a croak or a whimper, but what comes out is more like a roar. Something to put the Dragon to shame.  
The echo is slight and quickly lost in the clamour of the waves.  
Again, he thinks of school. Of looking up at the height from which he was dropped and seeing, through his tear-blurred vision, the pusher, wearing the hysterical smile of a child who has gone too far but does not know how to take it back.

He tries again.

And then he thinks of the carnivorous pain of the time Hannibal gut him. How, for a moment, when they were pressed together even as the knife dug deeper into his inside (missing every vital organ, but calculated to cause the most amount of pain possible), Will knew that he had made a mistake. 

Not one that he could walk away from either. This would be a mistake that called for staggering or crawling. He had done everything up to this point as wrong as he could possibly do it, and was paying a price that he had never really believed Hannibal would claim from him.  
When Hannibal stabbed him, Will thought that would be his end. With Abigail thrashing and bleeding gallons on the carpet, and the feathered stag gasping and wounded in front of him, what  
else could he think?

He never imagined that Hannibal would go as far to remove himself from the equation- to give up on his project, or as Will now knows it, his courtship, by killing Will.

One more time, Will tries.

And moments pass in a relative silence. A roaring silence.  
Will considers his options. His hands have been scraped nearly bare of their flesh across the knuckles. He isn’t sure how it happened, but he’s bleeding quite a bit into the water. It doesn’t seem likely that, with the state of his hands, that he’ll be able to hang on for much longer. Letting go will bring about a simple death. Drowning as he sinks in exhaustion. Food for the sharks.

Returning either as a widowed partner or a traumatised hostage is also out of the question. Will has had more than his fair share of such charades, and he’d rather stay out of the critical gaze of the FBI or the inevitable media circus, if he can. After everything he has done, both on his own and in response to what has been done to him, he will not be compartmentalised as a victim of the sick Doctor Lector’s whims and whimsy. If he leaves nothing else behind him tonight, then at least he will leave that.

And, still, Hannibal has not answered. So, Will makes his choice.

He lets go of the rock. An instant later, his wrist has been seized, locked in a vice grip, and he has been dragged back to almost the same position on the rock, aside from that now he has an arm wrapped around him as an extra anchor.  
As he would expect from someone who has recently been shot and dropped off a cliff, Hannibal’s voice is tired and torn.

“I did answer.”  
“I didn’t hear you.” says Will, his own voice hollow.

“Would you rather I let go?”

It is difficult to answer him around all of the sea water trying to get into his mouth, but Will manages. All he needs is one syllable, at any rate.

“No.”

And with that, as one, they make for the shore.

 

The weekend has a clear routine. While this is not always adhered to, both Will and Hannibal are men of habit, so it is almost certain that on a Sunday morning and afternoon, they can be found in their individual working spaces. Saturday is reserved for getting out of the house. Taking a walk with the dogs, driving somewhere into the mountains on one side, or the coast on the other side. Visiting with friends, although recently, they have come to a mutual decision that, at their age and with their hobbies, friends are more obnoxious than they are welcome in their lives. 

Sundays are mostly a lonely affair, unless there is an invitation that neither of them can dodge, when normally the other will be roped into coming along, if only to provide some amusement to the other. Will gets up first and, still groggy with sleep, dresses to work in his shed. The shed, which at this point is more like a small working garage that could put the one they use in the repair shop to shame, is a respectful distance from the house. If Will happens to blow anything up (which he has not done for several months) he won’t hit the house or disturb the peace very much. He can make as much noise as he wants to there without fear of wearing Hannibal’s nerves thin.

For his part, Hannibal is usually up early enough to be in the kitchen with a coffee to watch Will cross the yard, the dogs buzzing around his legs, and lock himself up in the garage. Like Will, Hannibal always has a project in his own space.

The smell of blood has become slightly cloying. Too much of it, spilt in too little time. With the exhibition looming over him, Hannibal has had to cut a few corners. Where he might normally torment the girl in more intelligent ways, he just cut her. Incidentally, she reminded him of Miriam Lass. Not out of any positive similarity, due to an iron will or a determination to survive- she just bore a passing resemblance to her. It was passing, but it was enough that Hannibal wishes he had had more time to make her demise painful.

Now that he thinks about that, scrubbing her blood from the floors a few days later, her stepfather has more than likely made her life so far painful enough.

He washes her blood from the tiles. The walls. The chair, like a model that would have been used in psychiatric hospitals at the turn of the century, complete with straps and chains to hold his projects stiff and in place. When Will first saw it on one of his rare jaunts into what he refers as the ‘man dungeon’ (Hannibal had expressly forbidden the phrase ‘man cave’ in his household, but Will found a loophole), he thought it was an electric chair. He then formed the impression that Hannibal was using the chair as a kind of toaster and couldn’t be persuaded to stop laughing for a solid ten minutes. Hannibal didn’t mind so much. Hearing Will laugh is a strange and unexpected occurrence each time it genuinely happens, and he’s not fool enough to deprive himself of the pleasure of hearing it when he can.

Next, he moves onto the tools. He never leaves tools bloody. Slovenly manners with his tools invites rust. The surgeon’s habits in him won’t allow that, and what’s more, he couldn’t abide it if his victims mistook him for some kind of redneck serial killer; a group whose tools are so often so dismally rusted and bent, Hannibal marvels that they are able to get any killing done at all.

His collection of tools has expanded somewhat since Italy. The hook that Jack picked up during their scuffle not only made him look like a madman and made his blows vicious, but it made Hannibal jealous. So, one old, but still tough and useful hook sits among his tools. As well as that is the usual array of scalpels and other surgical implements, which he uses for precision rather than intimidation, and a few larger knives. Meat cleavers and the like. 

Since they moved this far into the heart of the American country, and the American Dream, Hannibal has had to become his own butcher. Will doesn’t see why this irritates him, saying that his years of experience in butchering have been more than enough training.

He always eats what Hannibal cooks without complaint, at any rate.

Hannibal is just about to move onto blasting the last traces of the smell of blood from the room with massive quantities of bleach when a light goes off on the wall and bathes the room in red. The alarm, silent and flashing, to tell him someone is on the property who should not be. Slipping out of his apron, Hannibal puts a small, clean scalpel in his pocket just for safety’s sake and takes the stairs up. He comes out into the main house, through a closet with a false back.  
To get out, he must open two doors, each one with a combination padlock and a few latches. Once out, he checks himself for spots of blood. Will keeps a few shirts spare in a hidden drawer, just in case Hannibal doesn’t have time to get upstairs to change. 

Today, he is fine. He managed to keep the smell of the cleaning products off with the heavy apron to attract all the splashes and spills, so whoever is at the door should not notice anything wrong unless they are a bloodhound. Or have a similarly heightened sense of smell as Hannibal does, but he sincerely doubts that.

At the door is what he would have Hannibal believe is a police officer. Straight away, Hannibal can tell he is not what he claims to be. The uniform is spotless, as is the man’s professional demeanour and posture. For all intents and purposes, the man is a police officer. Except for the fact that Hannibal does not recognise him, and he has made a special effort to memorise most of the faces of the department, and if not memorise, then to at least know them in passing when he sees them on the streets.  
Also, there is something off about the man, and the man is painfully aware of it. Because he knows this, Hannibal knows this.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing, or the other way around?

“Dr Faust?” says the man.

“Yes.”

“I need to ask you a few questions, sir.”

“This is about the cult, yes?”  
The man shifts his weight to the other leg “Yes sir. We’re asking everyone we know, sir, so don’t take it personal. The department’s got all of us out just begging information.”

Hannibal slips out onto the porch. No sooner than he has shut the door does he hear the bay of the dogs, echoing up the hill. Will must have seen his own alarm flashing and sent them out to keep him company.

The man looks over his shoulder and tenses in alarm when he sees Actaeon and Girl barrelling towards him. Hannibal notes that his hand twitches towards his right pocket. The man is not wearing the gun that would finish his ghoulish attempt to blend in, meaning are weapons hidden on him. All over him, most likely. He must be bristling with knives underneath that vest. From the way he stands, poised forward slightly, Hannibal judges he must also have a gun in the back of his pants or somewhere similar, so that he feels he must crane forward to avoid touching as much of it as he can avoid touching.

“No need for alarm,” Hannibal leans on the porch and stretches out his hand. Actaeon and Girl fly to him and jump up on the ground, licking his hand “Come here.” he addresses them, but the man starts forward a little before he realises his mistake.

The dogs settle at Hannibal’s feet, posed on either side of him like sentries. Already, Girl senses the artificial quality to the man. She draws her lips back from her teeth, but does not growl.  
Hannibal scratches her between the ears “They’re quite harmless.”

“That Shiba doesn’t look so harmless.”

“She doesn’t enjoy the company of strangers very much, I’m afraid. Such is the case often with rescue dogs.”

The man’s eyes flick between them as he tries to judge which one will be the greater challenge, if he must fight them. As Hannibal thought, he must have a small firearm stuffed clumsily into the back of his pants, and a few knives in his pockets. Also, rather comfortingly, the man does not seem to like his odds against two dogs- not to mention their owner.

“What about the Shepherd? Is he a rescue too?”

Hannibal nods “My husband is something of a dog fan. He collects strays and sends them to shelters, and keeps them when he can. I’m quite sure he would have a whole flock of dogs if it were not for my insistence.”

“ Huh.”  
Were he really a police officer trying to put him at ease, he would probably share a story concerning his own spouse’s obnoxious obsessions. Animals or china or a certain TV show that he cannot tear them away from. But, because he is a fake, he keeps his eyes on the dogs and tries to appear professional and intimidating.

“What were those questions, officer?”

“Uh, just basic stuff. This is all just ground-work, you understand, no one is accusing you or your husband of anything.”

Which means, to Hannibal, that whatever kind of organisation this man belongs to strongly suspects their household of wrong-doing and has sent this hapless man over to test the waters. He cannot feel even the faintest twinge of pity or sympathy for this poor fool who has clearly drawn the short straw, however. At the best of times, Hannibal doesn’t do pity. And this is a Sunday. Hannibal is not in the habit of indulging other people’s nonsense on Sundays, when he’d rather be cooped up in his ‘office’.

The man is probably a cultist. Now that Hannibal looks closer, past the shadows on his face, he notes that the man is barely more than a boy. He does not recognise him as one of Will’s students, or one of the faces he is accustomed to seeing in the packs that languish around the stores in the summer or pour out into public transport and the streets after school. He’ll figure this all out later. The priority is to get the sheep in wolf’s clothing off of his front-porch.

“Those questions?” he repeats, this time with some firmness.

The boy pauses. In all likelihood, he has come with a set of carefully prepared questions and just forgotten them completely, in the face of intimidation. He flounders for a second, then comes up with something.

“Have you seen anything strange on your property?”

“No.”

“No lights in the woods? And no noises that you couldn’t explain?”

“Nothing that we could not explain.”

“Has anyone…unsavoury recently tried to gain entry to your house, or approached you or your husband with some flimsy pretext for befriending the two of you?”

“No.”

“Have you heard anyone making death threats?”

“No.”

“Have you been getting any strange calls? Any activity that would make you suspect the two of you are being hunted at all?”

“No.”

“And you don’t suspect anyone that you know of being at all involved in these murders?”

“No.”

“Alright. That’s- that’s it.”

The boy relaxes slightly, believing his work to be completed. He backs off the porch and towards a car that was parked at the most extreme edge of the drive-way, so he wouldn’t be noticed arriving. Hannibal can’t fathom why he thought that it would be a cohesive cover, if he arrived in a plain car, but came in a full-uniform. 

“You take care out here, sir, it’s very remote. If the two of you are attacked, it will be difficult for you to call for help.”

Hannibal just nods with a faint, slight smile and lets the boy speed-walk to his car and pull out. The tyres scream and kick up dirt as the car tears away.

“Will?”

There’s a knock on the floor-boards from underneath the porch “I heard it all.”

“What do you think?”

“Well I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that kid was with the police.”

Hannibal laughs “It would seem we have attracted some unwanted attention.”

Will comes out from underneath the porch where he has been crouched, a knife in one hand and a gun in his pocket, and dusts the leaves and cobwebs off of his shoulders “Whoever they are, they will come in a few weeks. They don’t want to get us now, while we’re still on our guard. People like that- the people who send in a bumbling kid to do their work- they’re trying to underwhelm us. I would think it’s safe to say they know who we are- Girl, no kisses. No, Girl, down, down.”

The Shiba thrusts her face into Will’s chest, her tail thumping the floor. She has recovered quickly enough from the quick invasion of her home, but Hannibal has no doubt that she, and her counterpart, will be pacing the downstairs tonight. Patrolling, like the good soldiers they are, in case of a reappearance of the interloper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little aside about Will and Hannibal going over the cliff.  
> In the fandom, ever since the last episode people have been writing their epilogues, and I notice that a lot of people write it as though Will and Hannibal fell off the cliff in the sight of the FBI. I don't know if that happened canonically on the show and I just missed it because I was so frantic about that being the last minutes of the episode, but I decided I had better add a little bit in there.  
> You know, make it clear that there was an audience to see them fall. Give Will a little bit more of a reason to toss them off the cliff than just satisfying that desire to strike back against Hannibal and reclaim his morality. Personally, I think that was the reason that he threw them off the cliff, but once he hit the water and realised that they were both still alive, he also realised that he had gotten it out of his system.  
> And then they moved on. Saw places. Bonded. Cooked certain ex-wives.  
> All the good stuff.


	5. Convergence on the cross-roads

There was a year when it was unusual to stay in one town for more than a month. In the grand scheme of things, a year is not that great a measure of time.   
It was certainly long enough to show Hannibal that, yes, Will was past the shyness, the annoying vestiges of a skewed morality that kept him from exercising his talent for killing. And it was long enough to show Will that Hannibal was perfectly capable of establishing a household, of running it and acting as a spouse. 

At the end of the year, when the wounds that Dolarhyde had inflicted had long since turned to scars and they had had their fill of Europe, they came to a decision in a small apartment in London. Will suggested that they return to America. Hannibal followed this up with something that was meant to be a witticism- an image of them sharing a house, a few dogs, being disgustingly domestic and nuclear, which quickly turned into a plan of action. 

So, back they went, with forged identities that were clever enough to conceal them if the FBI were still searching, but close enough to their original selves that they could still claim the same skill-sets. Hannibal, an intellectual. Will, a teacher and a mechanic.   
They picked an unremarkable town, caught somewhere between back-water and charming. The kind of town that did not so much greet new settlers as absorb them as quickly and completely as possible. The town was in need of some new blood, and were glad to receive the injection of class that Hannibal brought. There was plenty of working-class, skilled hands to go around, but Will made himself unusual for his teaching qualifications. 

It took about two months to settle in. If either of them had had any doubts about what they were doing, those were quickly settled and forgotten when Will brought home the first dog. Both of them then realised that there was no bowing out or giving up on what they had found and arranged for themselves. So far, there has been little in the way of desire to relocate from either. 

The only time Will ever gets a pang of wanderlust tends to be when wandering the aisles of the local gourmet store, which, as Hannibal is fond of remarking to him while they’re packing the latest batch of shopping into the kitchen cabinets, is remarkably well-stocked for a town in the middle of provincial American-nowhere. While Hannibal talks shop with the butcher behind her counter, Will examines the foreign labels and thinks back to the year of travel. 

Perhaps that would have been the single best year of his life, had the last three not been so good to him as well. Certainly, it was tense and confusing, and sometimes tumultuous with Hannibal. The two of them were not used to seeing each other with all barriers removed. Hannibal had never seen what Will really looked like when he cut loose and stayed that way. When he had nothing to guard. Up to that year, Hannibal had only speculated as to what that might look like, and meeting the real thing must have been disconcerting for him in some way.

Will had never seen Hannibal as anything but polished and glossy, even in prison, so he considered it something of a rude shock to find out that Hannibal behaved like a normal human in some ways- by getting bed-head, for example, or sneezing. Somehow, he had never once seen Hannibal sneeze before, and it was as shocking as a bomb going off beside him the first time it happened.

When he longs for an open European road, or for a South-Asian sea, or for a Middle-Eastern mountain, he just reminds himself that this is the best thing for both of them. Stability. Routine. A safe place in which to hide and enjoy the peace they have wrested from the hands of fate. 

The feelings never last long once he is over the threshold, with his arms full of dinner for the next few nights.   
Indeed, today, when Will steps over the threshold with Hannibal on his heels, he almost immediately loses the longing that he was entertaining in the store. He had been thinking about their experience in Russia, which was by far the shortest stop throughout the year, as it was only a lay-over on a trip that ultimately ended in Thailand.

The winter had been unbelievably bitter. Will thought he was accustomed to the cold of winter, thanks to the frigid, plunging temperatures that Wolf Trap could reach, but that was an entirely different type of cold together. He remembers very clearly, watching a mother schlepping home two children and dropping an egg from her basket of shopping. The egg was a frozen mound of broken yolk within seconds. 

The fierce desire to be back in a Russian winter has been replaced by a gentle amusement at the memory.

“Pop the trunk, will you?”

Will pops the trunk open and stores his bags inside, careful to place them on top of the cooler that Hannibal keeps in there almost all of the time. He’s not exactly sure what variety of the human anatomy is packed inside of it this week, but it should be obvious tonight. Like the rest of the groceries it will end up being returned to the kitchen within the hour, and then he’ll have a look inside.

“The butcher had something interesting to tell me about the agents that will be mixing with us shortly.”

Will checks the rear-view mirror and pulls out carefully “The butcher? What does she know about the FBI?”

“Her son just joined the force. According to her, the boy is something of a gopher for the beverages and sugary snacks that fuel our boys in blue- watch out for the woman,” once Will has safely stopped in front of the cross-walk and the old, doddering woman has made her way across the street with her walker, Hannibal continues “And he hears things he should not be hearing at his level.”

Will feels a sinking sensation he was hoping not to have to deal with again, in this particular life “Jack?”

“Jack.” confirms Hannibal.

Will shoots his husband a side-long glance “You’re excited.”

He folds his hands neatly in his lap “I would be lying to you if I said the idea of welcoming back an old friend didn’t excite me. Wouldn’t you be glad to see him again?”

“Not if he tries to shoot you, and you know he will.”

“I would hope that he has imagined a more creative demise for me. He has had four years to imagine one.”

Every year, on the anniversary of the day that Will and Hannibal allegedly perished over the side of the cliff- they reported it as a double-suicide, as a kind of Shakespearian, last ditch attempt die together before Will’s perceived victimhood and Hannibal’s extensive criminal record tore them apart again- the news is flooded with what is commonly referenced as their ‘Greatest Hits’.

The reports on their deaths days after the actual incident were superficial, and obviously designed to be that way by some higher-power with the ability to censor everything. Someone was trying to make the world forget about Will and Hannibal. For most of the year, it works.   
That is, until the anniversary rolls around. Nothing can hold back the celebration then- it’s almost like a holiday invented strictly for the media, like some kind of festival that merits just as much revelry as Christmas and Eid.

Despite Freddie Lounds’ numerous and spirited attempts to muddy his name, Will has stayed mostly pure in the eyes of the media. With Jack Crawford and a string of agents who claim to know him well vouching for him, it does not really matter what Freddie, or the good Dr Chilton, say about him. The idea of an incorruptible, brave soul standing up against the forces of evil, and falling in love along the way, is just too attractive for the media to resist.

Hannibal, on the other hand, is despised and celebrated in equal measures. Around the time of year that they talk of their death, they cycle through the most gruesome murders attributed to him as the Chesapeake Ripper, in other incarnations, such as the Shrike, and the seemingly random killings around the area that have also come to be popularly accepted as his work.   
Memorials are often organised in an attempt to disguise the worship, but there’s always a new book being published about their relationship and respective careers. Guaranteed best-sellers.

Every time that specific period of the year rolls around, it is treated as something of a time for reunion. Jack Crawford is inevitably roped into a TV appearance. Last year, this was reduced from the grudging appearances he used to make, probably on the orders of Purnell, to assure the media that he was reasonably certain that the two of them were dead, though he could not present any evidence to say so, to a simple comment saying that he no longer wished to be contacted for information about the situation.  
As far as he was concerned, he said, it was ancient history to him.

Will enjoys seeing Jack splashed across the news. It is something of a reunion for him. Whenever a programme comes on the news, no matter how repetitive and dulled-down it is, Will is sure to be watching it, somewhere. If he hasn’t got anything that needs attention on the stove, Hannibal will come in and shoo a dog off the couch so they can watch the broad-cast together.

The first three years, Jack was saying the same sorts of things about the despicable nature of Hannibal’s crime and, on a larger scale, his personality and behaviour in general.  
About Will, he would always say that Will was suffering from a dose of heroism which drove him to attempt to exploit Hannibal’s inexplicable tolerance of him, and a dash of Stockholm syndrome, which made him more susceptible to Hannibal’s schemes. About Alana Bloom, he would say that he had no idea of her current whereabouts, to which Will would always say: “He probably just got off the phone with her.”

The fourth year, which is about to come to a close, saw him refusing to comment, to appear, or to have anything to do with the case. Jack has put it behind him.

But the butcher says otherwise, apparently. 

“What do you want to do about it?”

“What do you mean, Will?”

He shrugs “I mean, do you want to bring Jack over to the house, or avoid him completely? We’re not going to be able to stay under the radar as long as he is here. It might be better for us if we left the town entirely for a few days.”

The other man shakes his head “That would only arouse his suspicions. If he were to hear that the curator of the art museum and his husband took leave of the town the moment it was announced the FBI were coming to town- that he was coming with them, no less, he would certainly want to see our house. Jacks knows the kind of house I run. He knows the kind you ran. He would not have a hard time figuring out what a hybrid of those two looks like…the havoc he could wreak, Will, if he found your shed, or my dungeon.”

Hannibal then winces, realising what he has called his own work-shop. He is irritated enormously by the label that Will has given to his particular space in the house, and even more so by the fact that he has slipped into the habit of using it.

“Alright, so we stay…is this light going to turn red?”

Hannibal squints “I think you’ve got enough time.”

Will bumps the gas a little bit and manages to make it just in time, swooping underneath the light itself just as it turns a glaring red. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches another car brake and narrowly miss side-swiping Hannibal’s side of the car. His heart-rate picks up just a little bit, as he catches a glimpse of the pale face of the driver. A woman, frozen stiff in her seat for fear of the accident she has just missed. 

“These out-of-towners,” he says bitterly, his mouth dry “Driving like they’re in a derby.”

Glancing over his shoulder briefly, Hannibal opens the glove-box and offers Will an Aspirin “You look like you’re going to need it soon.”

Will accepts one and dry-swallows, which is a talent of his that both fascinates and disgusts his husband. Apparently, Hannibal has never been able to swallow a pill without a mouthful of some liquid to chase it down, which strikes Will as unusually prissy for Hannibal.

“So,” continues Will “We stay, and what? How do we get through this without bringing the entire Bureau down our heads?”

“I am sure Jack can be persuaded.” says Hannibal, full of that creeping, quiet confidence that Will still cannot help but find unnerving “He is, after all, tired of this circus following him around. If he were to unearth these old demons, it would as Daedalus returning to his Labyrinth. Already, he has spent so much effort removing himself from the confines of his relationships with us. Jack is neither a fool nor a masochist. The trick, I imagine, will be hiding from the rest of the agents that come with him.”

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to hide from them. They’ll know our faces. Purnell probably thinks we’re behind this.”

“I shouldn’t think so. These murders are more like an orgy than they are murders. Nothing that you or I would produce.”  
“Besides, didn’t Daedalus crawl back into his Labyrinth to die?”

“Only after he finished what was one of the most illustrious careers of the ancient world. Jack has yet to finish his opus, I’m sure. He has no intentions of crawling into his Labyrinth to die. Not yet, at any rate.”

Will makes a turn onto the first of the many secluded, wooded roads they must take to get to their home. It makes for a more peaceful journey, when the rest of the world is muffled by the trees on all sides. This is the way Will prefers the world. When it is just the two of them, in their own, private existence that cannot be breached without permission.

As he responds, he notices he has managed to relax a little. His teeth are no longer gritted, and his words are less stiff “They don’t have much experience with my way of murdering, you know. They didn’t get to see me in action but once.”

Hannibal smiles at the fond memory of Will’s first piece of work “They do know whose work you take inspiration from.”

“Pardon me, but I have moved away from being a copy-cat. I have my own distinct style, thanks very much.”

Hannibal laughs “Excuse my rudeness, of course you do.”

Will’s style of killing isn’t so much a style as it is a procedure. 

His capacity for empathy means that Will does not enjoy causing an excess of physical pain, unless his victim has done something to really, really warrant it. The empathy disorder means that in murdering someone, adopts their point of view of the murder as well as his own. Their fear, and their pain to the point that he sometimes suffers light, physical sympathy pains. It is an unpleasant side-effect to contend with, but Will does not let it get in his way.  
Merely, it means that his kills are quick and methodical, unless he feels obligated to cause as much pain as possible before the release of death.

If there is some well of irony to draw upon, for example, from the dead person’s past life and crime, then he will draw upon it eagerly.  
Just as he mounted Randall Tier upon the skeleton of the ancient bear, he does not hesitate to crucify hypocritical preachers, or to use the implements commonly found in a classroom to gouge out or off the features of a teacher. One especially brilliant and critical moment in Will’s career so far was the time he emptied the chest cavity of a florist, who was suspected (and rightfully so) of raping several young men and women in the area. He filled her chest with a mix of poisonous and benign flowers.

Chrysanthemums and columbines and tamarisk. Rue and geranium and foxglove. Narcissus and nightshade and a lone branch of yew to serve as the centre-piece. Charmed though he was by the nod to one of his previous works, it amused Hannibal greatly that Will had to Google the floriological meanings of each flower before he would consent to planting them in the shallow soil bed he cultivated in the chest cavity.

“We can handle this.” says Will.

He reaches for Hannibal’s hand and squeezes it. They finish the drive in a comfortable silence.

 

Tahcawin Walker lets out a shaky breath “Excuse my driving, sir, I’m not normally so sloppy.”

Jack Crawford relinquishes his iron grip on the arm-rest, glad that he did not rip it off the seat entirely in his anxiety “These small town people. They drive like they’re all in tractors.”

He rubs a knot at the back of his neck and hopes with all his might that it is not the beginnings of whiplash. A quick glance in the back-seat shows him that Winston is alright, if a little jostled by the sudden stop that Tahcawin was forced to make when the black car sped up at the last second and darted across the intersection. Out of a habit beaten into him by many years of police-work and the like, Jack automatically reaches into his data-bank of a memory for the make and model of the car. He stops himself. There is no need to be marking the folks in that car. 

In all probability, by the driving behaviour of this town, Tahcawin was the one driving erratically, not knowing when other cars were about to scream out in front of her to beat the red lights.

After checking carefully that no more cars are about to brave the red-light, Tahcawin crosses the intersection. They are making for the police station. Jack’s expectations are low. They cannot help but be low, after twelve victims of the same cult. What kind of people, he wonders, run a police station in such a way that they have allowed twelve young people to be murdered? Five couples, two children, and all of them by the same cult.

Well, perhaps. Jack has his suspicions about the dead child they found arranged in the foetal position underneath the bridge. The work and the MO are entirely different, which, again, only raises another question against the efficiency and intelligence of the police department they are about to join forces with. Why would they even begin to think that these were the same killers? Branching out so soon after their spree had begun? Jack doesn’t think so, and Jack is rarely wrong.

The last time he can remember being horribly wrong about the true quality of some murder case was four years ago, and even then, it was more down to misjudging a character rather than a motive. Even now, he likes to think that Will has always had the best intentions. At some point, Will’s priorities changed, and this is what Jack missed. Will went from serving the best interests of the law to serving the best interests of his relationship with a certain, devious doctor.

Jack may never forgive himself for watching that happen. And, a short three years after Will had come as close to escaping Hannibal as he was ever going to be, for pushing Will back into the mess.

He realises Tahcawin has been trying to get his attention for several streets now.

She looks at him in concern, as if she fears she might have broken the old veteran “Sir, are you well?”

He nods “I’m fine. I was just thinking…I’m not sure it’s going to be in our best interests to integrate ourselves entirely with the local police force. It would be better for us if we treat them like an information source, rather than equals.”

A flicker of irritation passes across the woman’s face “I’m aware of that, sir, this isn’t my first investigation.”

“Oh, that wasn’t a challenge to your experience. I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” he lies through his teeth, thinking back to her expression when she handed him the file- like a child who had just been told that Santa Claus is only her parents planting presents and nibbling at the offerings of cookies and milk she has left out faithfully every year “I’m not certain that these people do, however. They don’t know how to handle spree killers.”

“Do any of us?” asks Tahcawin, her eyes distant.

Jack smiles wryly “Profound, but I’m not sure that’s the right question to ask in this business. What was your first investigation, by the way? Outside of the classroom.”

He already knows very well what her first investigation was- a small affair, concerning a murdered drug dealer, which the FBI eventually passed over to the DEA because it turned out the murder was linked to a giant drug ring operation. Her conduct was the terrified and rigid conduct one expects of a newbie in the field- petrified of the world of real violence they have suddenly been tossed into, and of making mistakes that might derail the entire operation. While the investigation was in her hands, she did all the right things, said all the right things, and even contributed to a major break-through that actually lead to the discovery of said drug ring which got the DEA involved.

Jack knows he is not dealing with a rookie, but it will be interesting to see what she thinks of herself.

“It was a drug-related murder case. Nothing that outstanding about it, except we uncovered a drug ring attached to it. Not a small time dealer like we originally thought. It eventually got taken up by the DEA.” she says all this with a straight-face and makes no mention at all of the incident Jack read about.

If she doesn’t want to talk about it, then Jack won’t broach the subject. Killing a man for the first time, on your first job, would be difficult for anyone to discuss, let alone admit to. He vividly remembers the first fatal shot he delivered. A male escort pulled a knife on him. Jack was young and idealistic, and not yet jaded enough to draw his gun on the first swing. The escort stabbed him in the shoulder and through the hand before Jack realised his initial mistake and blew the kid away. He was aiming for the hand brandishing the knife.

He caught the hand and knocked the knife away. The bullet passed through the escort’s hand, still going strong, entered the brain and came to rest at the back and bottom of the jellied, obliterated mess it had made of the head, which settled on Jack’s vest in a fine pink mist.

There was an investigation, just as there was with Tahcawin’s fatality. As he was by then a seasoned agent, his was much shorter than Tahcawin’s. Just as she was cleared of any wrong-doing, he was, and has largely forgotten about the incident until the nights when his mind tends towards the darker side of his life. When the absence of Bella beside him grows to be a gaping hole of a sensation, and he can only distract himself from her death by thinking of other deaths.

“Sir…you don’t think that the…you know. You don’t think Hannibal Lector is involved in this at all, do you?”

A chill climbs Jack’s spine at the mention of the name. This sensation is a familiar, involuntary one he cannot shake no matter how many times he hears the name “I’ll let you in on something, Agent Walker. Officially, I’ve been retired since Will threw himself and Hannibal over the cliff, but I’ve been called up four times since then to help on a case. Every time I get called in, I get asked that question. I’ll give you the same answer that I give everyone else: Will Graham killed Hannibal Lector and himself. They’re dead and there’s nothing more to it.”

She falls silent for a moment.

They pull into the police station. A low building, made of concrete with the branch’s name emblazoned in great, tacky letters over the thick glass-front where the doors are mounted. Jack lets out a sigh, and prepares himself to be steeped in small-town incompetence and ignorance.  
He reaches back and unclips Winston’s collar from the seatbelt. 

The dog jumps up and begins to pace energetically. By now, he is quite accustomed to coming into police stations with Jack and loves making friends with as many uniforms as he can manage. Jack always attracts weird looks and gives the impression of being a reclusive lunatic on a sharp decline, when he brings Winston with him, but he honestly couldn’t care less what kind of impression he gives these days. He knows himself, and that’s what is important. He also knows his dog, though, and Winston chews the furniture when he’s left alone for extended periods of time.

“You still use his first name.” mutters Tahcawin.

He can tell that she regrets the words the second they’re out of her mouth. Somehow, this does not put him in the mood of forgiveness.

“What was that?”

She gathers her courage “Most people call him by one of his titles. The Shrike or the Ripper or Doctor. But you still call him by his first name.”

Jack can feel a steely expression settling on his features. It is one from an archive of glares and glowers that he created and perfected over the course of his career in the Bureau, meant to intimidate and punish.  
He isn’t sure which one he is going for right now “Is that important?”

“No sir.”  
Tahcawin makes a quick escape and shuts her door with a little more force than necessary. The sound of their car pulling into what is mostly an empty parking-lot has attracted attention. The lobby behind the glass-front is filling up with blue uniforms.

Sighing again, Jack steps out of the car, shuts his door, and lets Winston out. Winston jumps up and licks his hands in excitement. He’s glad to be in front of another police station, because he knows the blue uniforms means a lot of pets and fragments of donut surreptitiously fed to him. Attention, attention, attention. 

Jack pats him on the head “Here we go, old friend. Brace yourself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry kids, Jack is just a disillusioned old man. Santa Claus is totally real.


	6. The Hand of Jophiel, and its fingers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unexpected dump-truck of teenage angst, for which I can only apologise. It should hopefully be obvious that this stuff is all plot-relevant, but for those of us who have our doubts, let me assure you: PLOT-RELEVANT ANGST AND TEENAGE HORMONES COMING YOUR WAY

For a long time, the clearing is quiet.  
As time passes, the boy grows more nervous. The uniform he has stolen so recently from his cousin lies rumpled in the back-seat of the car he drove to arrive at the designated meeting place. He would like to forget that it is there at all, but last night’s encounter is still so fresh on his mind. He sees the man’s eyes every time he shuts his own. They were cold in a way he has never seen before. A kind of calculated cold- more like the surface of a mirror, or a frozen lake, so that the ice was thick enough to obscure what was underneath, and when anyone looked, all they could see was a smudged reflection of themselves.

His reflection was timid. Swamped in the uniform. Barely brave enough to make his mouth move to deliver the scripted lines. Even if he had not been able to sense the doubt and derision from the man, he knew he was doing a bad job of it. Pretending to be an officer. For one thing, while he did not look too young to manage the job, he was painfully aware of his age, to the point that it made sure that the other man was. He acted young.   
He just straight up smelled of youth and inexperience and hormonal fear.

He bungled the job badly, he thinks, but not so badly that the man and his husband know they’re on the Hand’s list. That, at least, is some good news to report back with. If the others ever show up.

The first one to show up apart from him is Lakshmi Acharya. She walked, apparently, without breaking a sweat even though her house is two miles away, up-hill.  
She looks him up and down with something like that ice that was in the man’s eyes, except much thinner, much less practiced. He doubts he’s ever going to see a look as cold as that man’s again, unless it’s in the same man’s eyes.

She flicks a long sweep of black hair over her shoulder and begins to wrest it into a ponytail “Why are you here so early?”

He shifts his weight against the hood of the car “I just…I didn’t want to wait around.”

“Wait around for what?”

“For the gathering.”

“So you came to wait here instead of where?”

“Of home. I didn’t want to just sit at home and pretend everything’s normal. I’m sick of doing that. My fucking parents are driving me fucking nuts.”

Lakshmi rolls her eyes “Maybe you’d be less worried if you could just learn to act a little better. I don’t know why you can be so suave at your school, but turn into this moronic mess I deal with every week the moment you’re away from that crowd.”

Her words sting. Lakshmi is beautiful, and when beautiful girls look down on Roman it destroys him. The entire gender in general are just a poison to him. Hundreds upon hundreds of girls in the school, thousands in his town, and each one of them could destroy him with a single cruel word if they wanted to. Normally, the girls don’t know this.   
Normally, he is the one who holds the power. He is the one whom they have to prove themselves to. They would do anything for him. They have done anything for him, and now they’re doing anything for anyone who pays enough, and that’s paying for a series of expensive presents Roman has decided to give to himself.

But for some reason, Lakshmi knows exactly what’s going on with him and has managed to reduce him to a kind of lackey. He is by no means the youngest person in the Hand, yet they treat him like he is. Like the baby of the group, even though he had already done plenty of terrible things before his initiation.

He’s going to get her for it someday. That is, unless he can win her heart and get her in his crèche. She might spare herself from the various fates and punishments he plans before he sleeps every night, if she’ll see his side of the argument. He doubts it.

“So?”

“So?” he repeats uselessly, even though he knows what she’s asking. He just can’t summon up the words. His throat tightens whenever she is around.

“So,” again, she rolls her eyes “Roman, do they know it was us or what? Have they seen us, you fucking idiot?”

He winces and curses himself for reacting at all “Uh, no. They said no. I don’t think he was lying either.”

“They or he? How many of them did you talk to?”

“I talked to Dr Faust. I don’t know where Professor Columbus was.”

Lakshmi shrugs irritably “I bet he was in his workshop. He has one.”

Roman’s mind immediately jumps to the filthiest conclusion “Uh, you’ve been to his house?”

She guesses what he’s thinking, and it outrages her “Excuse me, do I look like a slut to you? He mentions it in class sometimes. Jesus Christ, you’re filthy.”

Roman shrinks in on himself. He wants desperately to crawl underneath the car, cork his thumb in his mouth and forget his troubles, but he is saved by the proverbial bell as another car’s engine cuts through the leafy silence of the woods. A pick-up truck staggers into the clearing. Tyrone Collins and Marlene Maleny get out, each of them wiping crumbs of soot from their clothes.

Marlene holds up her grey-smeared hands “My car is two steps from hell at this rate.”

Tyrone is far more offended by the ordeal than she, frantically dusting off his T-shirt and jacket “Man, I just fucking bought this shirt. You know the damned car broke down twice on the way here? Good thing we left early. We open the hood to see what’s wrong and we get this puff of smoke in our faces,” he wipes his forehead in disgust “I don’t even know if it’s safe to get back in that thing. Roman, I’m hitching a ride with you on the way back.”

Roman doesn’t bother to contradict him. He likes Tyrone the most out of everyone in the Hand. Still, that doesn’t amount to much. He would rather drive home in the same sour silence that he arrived in, but he doesn’t dare to voice his objection.

Thankfully, the other two are more occupied with cleaning themselves of the car exhaust than they are of how his mission into hostile territory went. They are more interested in reviewing the high-lights of their recent lesson with Professor Columbus, who is something of an icon in the group. The three of them are smugly satisfied with their performance as ignorants in his class, as they discussed the mentality of the Hand. Lakshmi is mad as a hornet, as usual, specifically at Sven Johannsson.   
Roman knows Johannsson. The big-brother of one of the girls who works for him. It would be no great loss to the world if Sven Johannsson met with the unfortunate accident that Lakshmi so wants to arrange, not even to his family.

“Johannsson wasn’t the only one being a pisshead,” points out Tyrone civilly “Callie Jones is really starting to get on my fucking nerves. Girls like that who think they can rule the world just ‘cos they’ve got good tits.”

Marlene smacks his arm “What are you doing looking at her tits? What would Santiago say?”

His cheeks colour slightly, which is hard to discern against his brown skin “Santi would say the same thing. She’s so irritating. I can’t stand girls like her, I really can’t. If we’re gonna get rid of anyone, we need to get rid of her and her boyfriend.”

Lakshmi scoffs dismissively “Please. They’ve been on the verge of breaking up for a week now. Just you wait. Calliope will come into class, red-eyed and half-drunk, complaining about how Teddy left her for that slut he’s been banging in the library for the last month. Like we said, we’re out to punish the romantically successful, not just the sexually successful.”

Again, Marlene aims a fond swat at Tyrone “Maybe we should come after you and Santi, huh? I swear, the way he looks at you. He’s gonna get down on one knee any day. Just you wait.”

Tyrone rolls his eyes “His inner-Catholic is too strong, Marlene. He still looks like he’s about to puke every time he sees a nun. Like they can smell the mortal sin on him. We’re far from the altar yet, believe me.”

Something one of them said has annoyed Lakshmi. He isn’t sure if she is rankled about that comment about the romantically successful vs the sexually successful, or just mad because Tyrone can hold down a steady relationship, while she scares off all the guys and the few girls who show interest with her acerbic personality and the withering, cruel way she talks.

“What the hell makes you say that, Marlene? This isn’t some kind of hate-crime club we have here. We’re reminding people that they’re not safe, not punishing people for being in love with each other.”

Roman thinks about disagreeing. He thinks about agreeing. He thinks about clearing his throat loudly and a dozen other things that will get him noticed, finally, so they will include him in their conversation. Ask him about those he thinks have qualified according to their criteria as valid targets. They will, later on, but he won’t care so much about it later on. He wants their attention now, and not just because he’s part of the group now and has a voice in what they do.  
He just wants them to realise he’s as interesting and devoted and motivated and so, unbearably fucking angry, just like they are.

They ignore him until the group has arrived in full.

It takes some time. They always come in drips and drabs, together or alone. The designated times are only suggested times. It isn’t unusual for the latest of the late-comers to be arriving an hour after the time they agreed on at the last meeting. While waiting for the ass-draggers to drag their asses in, people tend to make small-talk.  
Among each other, not with Roman. Treating it like some kind of exclusive, after-school club (which it is) and him like the kid freshly recovered from a humiliating case of head-lice. No one will come near him.

Including him, the Hand of Jophiel is comprised of nine people.

Lakshmi, Tyrone and Marlene are from the community college. Always standing together. If they aren’t fawning over their Professor Mark Columbus, who is apparently brilliant and, from what Roman has seen of him on the streets (and more recently on his property, peering out from the shadows), hiding some kinds of mysterious, dark secrets that make him magnetic. He doesn’t seem to enjoy the magnetism, they say, or even be aware of it.   
At any rate, if they aren’t talking about their professor, then the two girls are banding together to make digs at Tyrone and his boyfriend, who is gossiped about almost as much as Professor Columbus.

Roman wonders if they might indeed kill Santiago Valdez at some later date, if he and Tyrone should ever fight or if Tyrone should somehow do something dumb and summon the wrath of their leader down on his and his boyfriend’s end. Roman wouldn’t mind killing Tyrone. Or Santi- he’s seen them together in town, and he hates them for what they have. He’s not afraid to admit it to himself, usually by muttering it under his breath as he passes Tyrone, pretending not to know him, and Tyrone passes him, glad that he does not have to acknowledge him.

The others aren’t much better, but at least they do not have romantic partners to discuss.

Rosalie and Liberty are best friends, and a grade beneath Roman in the high-school. They clutch each other at all times and are forever exchanging gossip in hushed tones, giggling, stroking each other’s hair affectionately and planning what they’re going to do once the meeting is over. At school, the two avoid each other like the plague as each one of them heads up a separate clique. 

Rosalie is in charge of the goths, emos and everyone else loosely associated with that disillusioned kind of sub-culture, since the school isn’t quite big enough to have a population large enough to allow for these groups to form independently. She turns up her pierced nose at the preppy, pleated Liberty and her group of straight-laced, purportedly virgin nerds. They claim the best grades and the driest panties in the school, and probably have enough gold trophies between their study groups to pay off the National Debt.

Roman has actually slept with Liberty before, which was an experience he wouldn’t repeat if there were a gun to his head. The moment he started banging the head-board the way he likes to in sex she cracked up and couldn’t be persuaded to stop laughing, even during her climax. They mostly ignore each other at the gatherings.

Next is Samson, who lives next door to Liberty and has probably slept with her too. Samson doesn’t say or do much. He tends to put his back to a car or a tree and spend the entire meeting turning over a stone in his hands, unless he’s talked to. Samson is the kind of quiet kid who stares at a loaded gun every day before he goes into school and promises himself: “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Roman hates his type. He happens to know Samson outside of school as well. Samson is known among his girls as a creeper, as well as a general freak. He tends to turn up where they’ve planned ahead of time to meet their date for the night and will stare and stare and stare, ignoring all commands to go away on the odd occasion that they do approach him at all.

Louise, the home-schooled girl that works part-time at the convenience store, will come late most of the time. She likes to stand next to Samson and try to instigate conversation. Roman doesn’t think there’s a romantic ulterior motive- no one is here for romance, and no one here are friends outside of the gatherings except for Marlene and Tyrone, and Liberty and Rosalie.  
She just likes a captive audience when she talks, much like Johannsson. Since Samson never makes a move to walk away when someone is chewing his ear off (or any indication that he is listening either) he is Louise’s preferred target.

Even she doesn’t talk to Roman much.

And then there’s LaToya.   
LaToya is never the last one to come- that place is reserved for Liberty and Rosalie, but he’s never the first one, and he never shows up when there are downwards of two people around.  
LaToya only shows up when he has a crowd. His flock.   
He started the Hand, after all, and like the king in his castle, he likes to watch them at work.

When LaToya comes, he gets up on a fallen log being chewed to rot by fungus, like a speaker mounting a soap-box. Eyes turn on him and are quickly averted as he returns the stares. LaToya will be turning ten in a few months. There is no talk of any kind of birthday celebration- they let Louise’s fifteenth birthday pass without so much as a congratulations, so its looks like the Hand’s founding father’s first double-digits will pass into obscurity.

Shortly after LaToya has crunched out of the woods, in his flip-flops, denim shorts and a Transformers T-shirt, Samson comes up out of the woods after him. Briefly, Roman thinks of Mary and her little lamb, except that the image of LaToya carrying a shepherd’s crook manages to be so threatening that he drops it immediately. 

Louise next. Never far behind Samson.

Finally, as late as ever, Rosalie and Liberty join the group. Each one of them is wearing a summer dress with thin straps and plunging necklines. Rosalie has great boobs, but Roman knows for a fact that Liberty stuffs her bra with tissue. And not convincingly either.

As soon as the two girls are there, the group arranges itself into a loose circle. Of course, LaToya is at the head. Kicking some fungus from the log to make the footing better, he stuffs his hands in his pockets and surveys the group.  
Roman looks down when his eyes pass over him. He feels their heat like a spot-light, like steam has begun to rise from his skin, and is glad when he looks on.

“So, you guys know about the FBI?” it sounds like a question, but it’s not. LaToya expects everyone to use their own channels of information to find these things out, and woe on the bastard that isn’t updated with to-the-minute knowledge at each gathering.

Thankfully, the whole group nods.  
Expressions change from the smug ones that people tend to wear to the gatherings, to ones filled with concern, or which are grim and troubled, that are always slipped on after LaToya starts to talk.

LaToya’s face stays carefully neutral. He has an angelic smile, when he smiles. Sometimes Roman sees him shopping with his mother. He’ll make faces at the little-sister perched in the front-section of the shopping cart and grins widely every time he illicit a burbling giggle in response.

“They just drove up to the station,” offers Tyrone “Me and Marlene saw them. We were sitting by a red-light for a little while. Dr Faust and Professor Columbus almost got side-swiped by them.”

LaToya nods absently “Ok. I’m gonna find out who the woman with him is soon. They’re gonna be around a lot. I’ll get her to take me on a walk with her dog. Good job, by the way, Marlene.”

She nods stiffly “They’re still trying to get the ice up. We shouldn’t have to worry about the hotel being brought back to liveable conditions for another two weeks at least. I don’t know what we’ll do after that to keep them in your-”

“I won’t need them there, by then.” he says.

“Oh. Uh…ok. Ok.”

“Could you tell anything about the woman from looking at her?”

Marlene shakes her head “She just looks like another agent to me. No scars that I could see.”

“I’ll make sure of that.”

An uneasy silence falls on the clearing. Finally, LaToya turns to Roman. Adrenaline courses through him. For a moment, Roman considers running away. He wouldn’t get very far before someone shot him in the back- Samson and Lakshmi are always carrying guns at the gatherings, and Marlene is an accomplished archer- but at least it would be the effort that counts, right?

“How did it go?” asks LaToya.

Roman swallows hard “Well, they haven’t seen us. I was talking to Dr Faust-”

“Where was his man?” interrupts Rosalie impatiently. She has a habit of interrupting him impatiently “You do know there are fucking two of them right? What if the husband saw something that Dr Faust didn’t?”

His palms grow sweaty “Hey, I couldn’t search the fucking place. I had a tight time-limit on me, ok? I could only have the car out for a little while before my cousin noticed it was gone. I had to move fast before she got suspicious of me.”

LaToya glances towards the car “Why is the uniform on the back-seat?”

“I just put it there. When I got here, I checked it was under the seat, then I left it on the back-seat.”

“Don’t drive around with that thing out.”

“I won’t.”

“And hide it somewhere else than underneath the seat. That’s the car you share with your parents, right?”

Not for much longer, consider the rate at which Roman’s bank account is swelling, with his girls’ devoted help.  
He doesn’t report this to the Hand, however. Outside of the gatherings, what they get up to on their own is the individual’s business “Ok. I’ll put it in my room.”

“Nowhere your folks can see,” says LaToya “Or something might go down, yeah?”

He lets the threat hang in the air for a time, going unanswered and unacknowledged, but for the feverish heat burning underneath Roman’s skin.   
Eventually, LaToya clears his throat and moves on to another topic. He scratches at one of his scabbed knees vacantly as he speaks “We’re not gonna be killing this week.”

Lakshmi groans and Samson looks up in what is either shock, to find himself awake and in reality, or disappointment. Marlene elbows Tyrone sharply in the side, as if she has won a bet and wants her payment. Roman sees this is exactly what she wants, as Tyrone frowns and forks over a five-dollar bill.

“We gotta figure out what these FBI agents are like before we kill again. We don’t know how many more times we can kill, and I want to make sure we’re getting the best if it’s not gonna be for much longer.”

In spite of his growing resentment of everyone and everything in or to do with the Hand, Roman’s stomach drops in fear. This cult- this is his meaning, and it has been the brightest moment in his life for a long time. He hates it here, he hates them and they don’t like him very much. He’s only here because LaToya wants him here, for some reason he’s probably never going to be made aware of, but Roman loves what they do.  
He doesn’t just love it. He needs it.

Roman isn’t interested in looking around to gauge the others’ reactions. All he needs to know is what LaToya wants him to do, to make the cult last this out. To make sure they survive and can continue working for as long as possible. The plan, as it stands, is to keep going until they’ve killed twenty couples. Once they’ve reached that golden number, they will all stop and go their separate ways.  
Forty people will be dead and they will never have to worry about whether or not they have made a difference in the world, as they grow older and more and more disappointed with the various cards that life will go onto deal them. 

Roman will do whatever it takes to make sure they reach that number.

“So, sit still for a little while. Don’t call attention to yourselves or each other. I’ll let you guys know when we need to get back together. Roman, you’re sure they don’t know we were watching them?”

Roman shakes his head and says firmly “No, I’m sure they don’t know. They haven’t got any idea of what’s coming at them.”

“Good,” says LaToya “Marlene, Lakshmi, you guys go out there tonight and Tyrone and Rosalie can go there tomorrow night. You guys decide who gets the night after that, then we’re not gonna watch them for a little while. I want to hear about everything they do, ok?”

The mentioned of the group nod solemnly, except for Samson. He doesn’t seem to notice his name has been said at all, but LaToya doesn’t call him out on it.

“Ok, that’s it.”

With that, LaToya turns and walks back the way he has come. He doesn’t look back once or give any indication that he’s aware there are people behind him at all. 

Once the shrubbery has swallowed him up, Rosalie and Liberty quickly depart. Next, Samson starts back down the small game-trail he took to get here. Louise begs a ride from Marlene and Tyrone, on the condition that she stays out of sight and vacates the car in an alleyway so no one will know she has been with them. Tyrone seems to have forgotten that he demanded a ride from Roman, which suits Roman fine. Lakshmi says a cheerful enough goodbye to her classmates and departs, without looking at Roman once.

Roman gets into his car and turns the engine over. Lakshmi’s hair swings like a pendulum, or a liquorice whip down her back as she walks away. He thinks about following her in the car at a distance, of forcing her in so they can talk about just who should be talking down to who. He then reassures himself that he won’t touch her, unless she touches him first. He won’t take her into the back-seat unless she gets in it first.  
Then he thinks about starting the car suddenly, right this instant, just as Marlene’s pick-up truck is trundling out of sight and any witnesses are long-lost in the forest, and of how easy it would be to crush her legs and leave her to be eaten here.

But he can’t do that. Not as long as there’s a slim chance of getting her into the back-seat.  
Cursing, Roman slams his hand against the dash-board. He whirls around and seizes the stolen uniform, which he stuffs under the passenger seat again. Pulling down the same road that Marlene took, he watches his phone until he gets a bar, then calls his favourite girl of the week.

She answers breathlessly “Hello?”

“Flora.”

She gasps, and in the background he hears the peep of a treadmill and the rasp of its belt slowing as she powers it down “Oh, hi, Roman. Um, what’s up?”

“You at the gym?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“I’m gonna come pick you up.”

He can hear the grin in her voice “Oh, but I’ve got an appointment with my regular at 4.”

“Cancel it. Call him. Tell him he can see you tomorrow. I need you right now.”

He imagines her fanning herself on the other end of the phone, her cheeks colouring, her heart rate quickening “Ok, if you insist. But you should know I don’t work for free.”

He wants to shout every filthy curse-word he knows into her ear, but instead, he drops his voice to a sultry, low tone “And you should know when it’s business and when it’s pleasure.”

She giggles. Roman hangs up and throws his phone into the back-seat. All the way to the gym, he is blinking back tears and he doesn’t know why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LaToya's character. So, it has occured to me only after I picked that name that people may interpret my choice of names for the one character who has so far been identified as black as stereotyping, as well as my choice to use what might be termed as a 'ghetto' name by certain parties.  
> Let me assure you, I did not pick the name 'Tyrone' because of the character's ethnicity- it was because there was a storm outside when I was choosing their names, I thought of the word 'cyclone', became briefly obsessed with it, so picked a name that sounded like it.  
> And as to LaToya's name, I did not intend it to be a part of any pre-existing stereotype there might be that dictates that all those with 'ghetto' names are killers or something (if there is one). Yes, one of LaToya's parents is black, and the other is white, but the character's identity is not a comment on the kinds of social stigma that are attached to names like his.  
> I just really like the name LaToya.  
> Initially, I picked it because my sister pointed out that he was 'toying with everyone', so I thought, 'hey why not make a pun name again'? 
> 
> Sorry about that lengthy A/N, I probably imagined that controversy I was worried about causing.


	7. Arrivals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween everyone

(Several years earlier, in the base of a derelict light-house)

Though the light-house is supposed to stick out like a sore thumb by design, Will cannot put off treating Hannibal’s gunshot any longer. In the water and on the shore, a combination of stubbornness and shock had Hannibal treating his wound as if it were a mere paper-cut. He was no longer bleeding profusely by the time they reached the shore, and made some off-hand remark about not having to worry about his wound getting infected, since it was full of salt.

Will could only imagine the pain Hannibal must have felt. Thankfully, on the floor of the light-house, he is now passing in and out of consciousness, so he cannot be feeling much in the way of the sting. Will’s own cut is burning like a bitch. He can only hope there won’t be lasting nerve damage. As painful as it was to have a knife shoved into his face, Will kind of wishes Dolarhyde were still alive so he could laugh in his face and point to the scar on his forehead.  
He’d say: “Let me tell you about trauma to the face.”

“Jesus Christ.” mutters Will.

He has peeled back Hannibal’s shirt and got his first good look at the wound. The light of the moon has grown strong enough, so that the beams that are filtering in through the hole in the wall provide as much of the light as if he were sitting in the day. Except, of course, the blood is black in the moon. 

If Will had come to this light-house empty-handed, he would most certainly be able to do nothing except share what little body-warmth he has left with Hannibal as he bled out. But on the shore there were a few holiday homes. They deliberately let the waves sweep them along the shore, in the surf, until Hannibal pointed out one of the expensive, mercifully unoccupied homes to Will and they dragged each other ashore.  
Will made him wait on the sand and quickly raided two adjacent houses for medical supplies and something to keep them warm. Taking refuge in one of the houses would be far too obvious. Will saw the light-house in the moonlight and decide it was a safer bet. Jack would probably be thinking the same thing, when he comes upon it.

He will want to break away and conduct his own search, as his colleagues will no doubt be fixated on looking in the water and at the base of the cliffs for a spreading stain of blood. Later, when they figure out that either there are no bodies to find or they have already sunk out of sight, they will want to search the row of beach-houses for the fugitives.  
Well, the fugitive and his hostage.

Will guesses he will have enough time to plug up the largest holes in himself and Hannibal to prevent immediate death, and find a secure enough nook where they can pass the night without being discovered or contracting hypothermia. 

“Jesus,” he repeats, unsure if he is invoking God or just cursing “Ok, this is…this is…can you hear me?”

Hannibal nods.

“I’m sorry. This is going to hurt.”

To his credit, Hannibal makes less of a fuss than Will as Will cracks open the medical kit he salvaged from one of the houses and cleans the wound. He ensures that there are no fragments of the bullet lodged inside Hannibal with a brief visual inspection, and almost loses his head and vomits at the sight of Hannibal’s tissues on display. Of course Hannibal would just happen to be conscious for this embarrassing episode of dry-retching and watches in a mix of mild concern and amusement. He passes out again the moment Will comes at him with the needle.

Once that is done, Will cleans his own wound. It takes a considerable amount of his willpower not to weep like a child. His eyes do water, though, as the stinging antiseptic mixes with the salt in his wound. In the distance, he can hear the whir of helicopter blades chopping at the night. The motor of a boat that must have been borrowed from a nearby dock, zooming over the water. Shouts garbled by the roar of the waves and distance.

By the time he finishes, the lights are on in the first beach-house. By the time Will locates a likely looking spot underneath the stairs of the light-house, where a panel can be pulled away to reveal a compartment he suspects was used for smuggling or hiding moonshine or pornography, the lights are on in the second beach-house and the shouts are beginning to resolve themselves into actual words.

Will lowers Hannibal in and follows after him. He ensures that there is a liberal scattering of wet, rotted wood on top of the lid so it is not obvious that there is even a compartment in the floor in the first place. Once he closes the lid, the darkness is complete.

The shouts draw ever closer.  
He can hear them very clearly now.

“…no way they could have survived that!”

“No way, man. My wife- she just read this story about some hiker that fell 1000 feet, and when the rescue parties looking for his body came up, they found him reading a map and trying to figure out where he was. It happens.”

“They could have dived. If you’re trained right, you can make that dive.”

“I don’t think that even Hannibal Lector plans that far ahead.”

There is a sudden, violent chorus of hissing, which Will takes to be them hushing each other up. He hears a set of heavy foot-falls on the sand.

In the dark, Hannibal finds Will’s hand and takes it. His grip is firm and cooled by the sea, and slightly sticky from the blood on his hands. Will presses his shoulder against Hannibal’s. There is not much room to move in the tiny compartment. Even if they were in a full-sized room with an excess of space, of distance, Will would still be right here, squished under the same blanket.

The footfalls progress until they are slapping on the wet floor of the lighthouse. 

The voices resume in the near-distance. Orders are passed to search the next beach-house along, and, no, someone says, Crawford doesn’t need help, so don’t bother him.

“Will?”  
Jack does not call very loudly. Not even loudly enough to create an echo. It seems he might be calling for Will just to remind himself of what the name sounds like.

Will closes his eyes. There is no difference in the darkness, whether his eyes are closed or wide open in anticipation. He listens to Hannibal’s ragged breathing still, quiet and become so soft that it doesn’t seem to be there at all. He finds his own breathing has grown similarly quieted.  
Jack walks over-head. The wood under his feet groans, but does not give, and does not even groan loudly enough for Jack to notice.

He continues until he is on the stairs and then his footsteps are a receding echo. Will relaxes fractionally, but does not breathe normally again until Jack has tromped back downstairs a few minutes later. Again, he stops. A few more steps and he would be right overhead.

“I will find you,” he addresses the thin, salty air “I’ll find you both. Maybe not in this life, but if I end up having to search in hell then that’s fine by me. This has got to end.”

And he walks away.  
That night is the longest night of Will’s life, without exception. 

 

Will wakes up with an arm across his throat. 

“Goddammit Hannibal.”

He moves his sleeping husband’s unfortunately placed arm from his throat and stretches in the dark, trying to figure out what woke him. There were no dreams that would have merited this jolting return to consciousness. Hannibal’s arm was not that heavy on him either, so there must be something else that has bothered him.

Girl and Actaeon are curled up at the foot of the bed. Tonight, they have been allowed the rare pleasure of getting on the linen and putting their feet all over the sheets. Actaeon, who is still under the impression that he is a puppy, has sprawled his girth all over Hannibal, effectively pinning him down to the mattress. That’s going to be an amusing display- watching Hannibal disentangle himself from a dog half his size.  
As usual, Girl has chosen to sleep on Will’s feet. 

When he woke, so did she.  
Will bends at the waist and scratches her between the ears “What’s wrong, Girl? What’s going on with me, huh? Do you know? Is there someone in the house?”

She leans into his hand, her tongue lolling out. So, nothing bad to report from her. 

All the same, Will can’t shake the feeling that he is awake for a reason that is not so innocent has the return of his brief bout of insomnia (though that was anything but innocent), or just one of those random moments where the brain jumps back into the waking world. Careful not to disturb Hannibal or the dog, he slips out from underneath the sheets and steps onto the cold floorboards. Their temperature alone is almost enough to drive him back into bed, but Girl jumps off after him and he feels too guilty to have her up and moving as well to return to the cocoon of warmth.

Will retrieves a jacket from the closet and pulls it tightly around him, before crossing the room to the window. He opens the curtains just a crack, so that if there is anyone on the lawn to see them flutter or twitch, they will not notice. Nor see him, looking out.  
At first, Will doesn’t see anyone. 

This turns out to be thanks to the effect of the moon on the snow. It has bathed the entire land in harsh white, and both of the figures on his lawn are dressed almost entirely in white, or colours that are light enough to be washed out into white. He probably would have retreated to bed, defeated and confused, if it were not for one of the figures falling. Flat on their back, just, wham, right down. Will sees the second figure reach for them belatedly.  
In her frustration, the woman that couldn’t catch her companion throws her hood back.

Will groans “Goddammit.”

With a quick check that Hannibal is still soundly asleep and dreaming of whatever it is a serial murderer dreams of, Will opens the door soundlessly and heads down the hall. Girl trots after him. She smells the strangers on her lawn of course, but because her master is not openly concerned, neither is she.

Throwing the door open, Will steps into a flurry of light snow and stares at the woman.  
The woman stares back at him. Her face is beyond pale- bloodless from the cold and from fear.  
It has been several years since they last saw each other. Almost four years, but Will recognises her.

“Margot.” he says “What is it?”

Her mouth opens and shuts several times. She takes in the dog at his feet and the coat around his shoulders (which is actually Hannibal’s ; he must have reached into the wrong side of the closet), and the darkened house behind him. Her hair is pinned back from her face, but there are a few strands stray about her face in a way that, combined with her general exhausted appearance, tells Will she has been running for a long time.

He realises something as he looks over the second woman in the snow. His natural assumption was that it was Alana who crumpled, but now that he looks, he sees that it is not her at all.

“Margot,” he says slowly “What’s going on?”

“Chiyoh,” Margot glances at the woman in the snow “Chiyoh said you would know. You and Hannibal. You…you have to...”

Will struggles to process what is happening “I haven’t seen you in four years.”

Her eyes well up, furious and burning with hatred that he sincerely hopes is not directed at him “They were taken. They came into my fucking home and they took my wife and my son. You have to know who they are and where they are. You have to help me, Will. They’re going to kill them. Alana. My baby. You have to help them.”

 

Jack is enjoying a small, half-victory in the cluttered office of the local sheriff. 

The victory is only by half so far because the police station was in fact incredibly busy when he and Tahcawin walked in, and not slow, lethargic and altogether incompetent.  
The years away from the job has meant Jack has had the time to stew in his own bitterness and isolation. It has made him a bit of an old lunatic, he realises, and this realisation comes afresh as he shifts this way and that in the plastic chair, attempting to make himself comfortable. So far, the sheriff has been nothing but accommodating and apologetic.

He has taken the time to explain why Tahcawin and Jack arrived in such a flurry of activity- a girl has gone missing fairly recently, and she’s the step-daughter of one of the force, so of course the tribal instincts have been whipped into a frenzy and the force are out in, well, full-force, trying to track her down in the off-chance that she has not yet been finished off by the opportunistic killer, who has apparently taken advantage of the chaos the cult has caused to execute some of their own twisted fantasies.

The victory can only remain half due to the confronting earnest attitude of the sheriff. He’s really doing his best with a small force. The reinforcements can’t come soon enough, he says.

Tahcawin nods primly. Like Jack, she is by no means a small person and is also struggling to make herself fit in the small chair “We will do everything within our power to assist you.”

The sheriff is a greying man. Jack would guess he has been married to his high-school sweetheart for an upwards of 30 years and has several children, who have gone on to marry doctors and lawyers and set up their own practices. He would also guess, and correctly, he believes, that the sheriff has killed several people and never once regretted his actions. In the line of duty, of course.  
But Jack can smell the blood on him, and the lack of remorse has put his guard up. 

Used to be that he could accept that the killers he met in his work could accept what they had done, had made their peace with it. But since Hannibal began stepping in and out of his life, he has found it more and more difficult to tell himself that some kill and do not enjoy it, and to believe himself.

“But, you two are it, right?” asks the sheriff uncertainly.

Perhaps there is little need for him to disguise his emotions in the small space of the station, where the officers are most likely all friends outside of the office and expecting to have some of their children marry later on. Jack can tell the man is disappointed by the reinforcements he has been sent. He wanted a cavalry. Instead, he got two sour-faced, tired agents, pickled in their own anticipations and fear that had a lot of time to sprawl and blossom in the car on the way down.

Jack can understand the sheriff’s hope to have a little more brought in. And he doesn’t appreciate it.

“Yes, sir, we are it. I’m afraid the agency couldn’t send much more in the way of support.”

He frowns “They do understand that we got twelve dead kids down here? That’s a whole lot of grieving families.”

Tahcawin flinches visibly, but quickly regains her composure “I’m sure they do. But right now there is a substantial case on the other side of the country, taking up a lot of man-power and resources-”

The sheriff waves his hand dismissively “Now, I’ve heard about that trouble on the border. Those men running drugs all over from Mexico and those other places, but these are real fatalities here. These are children being killed, here. And another thing- the reporters in this town have been getting blocked all over the place, when they try to take their news to bigger sources. What does that mean, that blocking?”

A deep, sinking sensation seizes Jack and begins to tug him into a dread. This dread was a part of his old job. So familiar, so well-worn that it is like putting on a comfortable old coat after a long dry-spell. He thinks, briefly, of what the gentle media black-out the Bureau apparently imposed on the town without telling them could mean, then brushes the notion away.  
Not here. They couldn’t be here.

“Sheriff Dun, has your town ever experienced anything like this before?”

The sheriff blinks and draws back a little into his chair, as if offended “No sir we have not. We’re a small, caring community. People out here look out for each other, and when they don’t, everybody hears about it.”

Jack keeps his doubts about that to himself “That is what makes this an ideal situation. At the moment, we find ourselves in a situation where people are well aware of who their neighbours are and what they are capable of. If we allow the press their freedom to broadcast whatever they please, then we’re going to have some difficulty. News corporations from out of town will be coming in and harassing your officers and the people under your charge for a story, and let me tell you, the media is ruthless when it comes to getting the best stories.”

He has a fraction of a longer, unpleasant flashback about the time he spent out of the country following Will and Hannibal’s plunge, when he was unable to get any work done in the search for them. Hounded at all hours, his phone ringing and his various work-related and private emails full to brimming with messages from reporters, demanding to know what he knew.

It got to the point where, for both the safety of increasingly aggressive reporters and for his own mental health, that Jack was ordered to take a brief vacation for his health. A month spent on an island in the Pacific, where he saw Hannibal and Will about five times a day in the faces of the crowds and heard their voices on the street, next door to him while he tried to sleep, on the television…

No matter how unsavoury the true intentions behind keeping the town blacked-out are, Jack will endeavour to prevent the sheriff from experiencing the same thing that he did. For one thing, it will instil in him what will turn into a life-long hatred of the press. For another, if there were suddenly a swarm of reporters on town (most likely with Freddie Lounds leading the charge), it would hamper the investigation in the most insidious ways.

“Besides,” adds Tahcawin “If it were common knowledge that a cult were rampaging out of hand in this area, then you can be sure that you would have an influx of vagrants and lunatics responding to a call for arms. The cult could double in size, if what was happening in this town were common knowledge.”

Going by the flicker of alarm that crosses Sheriff Dun’s face, he had not thought of that “Well why didn’t you people say so in the first place? That’s all you had to tell me.”

“I would have thought it was common sense.” says Jack, a little petulantly.

Before the sheriff can react, the door swings open and a blonde woman bustles in, holding an old, stiff plastic landline, which she thrusts at the sheriff.

“Your housekeeper is on the line sir,” she glances uncertainly at the two agents “She can’t find your grandson’s inhaler.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake.”

The sheriff stands and walks briskly from the room trailing the stiff cord behind him and babbling into the phone in rapid-fire Polish. Jack catches a phrase that he recognises: “…on top of the dresser…”, then the sheriff is out of ear-shot and the two agents are left alone in a thick, awkward silence with the officer.

Winston takes advantage of the door being left ajar and trots it. He settles at Jack’s feet and thumps his tail on the ground, demanding to have his head scratched. 

The officer gives Jack a strange look “He’s a nice dog, sir. He was sitting out in the lobby with our secretary. Loves to be petted, doesn’t he?”

“Grooming behaviour. Winston likes to have a large pack.”

Tahcawin is giving the officer the same strange look that she gave Jack “How long is the sheriff’s call going to take?”

The woman shrugs “His grandson has some intense asthma attacks. If it’s bad, he might have to go on home a little early to take Santiago by the doctor.”

Resisting the urge to slam his fist on the table, Jack focusses on his dog instead. The reason he brings Winston along is both practical and emotional at this point. While it is true that Winston chews the legs of the kitchen table when he’s left alone for an upwards of three days, Jack could easily ask one of his neighbours (the fluttering, over-helpful kind that always seem to be washing the car or watering the plants when he sees them in their yard) to check in on him and change his water and the like.  
But he’d rather not. He would rather have his dog trailing behind him, the way he does wherever Jack is at home. Neither of them do very well in the company of other people (unless, for Winston, if there’s some kind of petting involved) , but nor can they thrive on their own.

Loners have to stick together, as Zeller pointed out, when it got passed around the Bureau that one of Will Graham’s dogs had turned up on Jack Crawford’s doorstep.

“Are you really all they’re going to give us?” asks the woman.

“Yes.” say Jack and Tahcawin in unison, down to their flat, humourless tones of voice. 

“Good. I don’t know where we were going to put all these agents, but if we’re only going to get two, then that’s just fine.”

The agents exchange an uneasy look.

“What do you mean, ‘put us’?” asks Jack.

The woman smiles “You must have noticed what a tiny town we are here. We only have one hotel, you know, and that hotel’s flooded right now.”

“Flooded.” repeats Tahcawin with a mounting dread. She can see where this is going.

“Sure. The folks that own the hotel, the Malenys, their daughter accidentally hit something in the boiler room when she was doing her archery practice, and before we knew it the whole first level was ankle-deep in water. It was like ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, except we were still on the floor. My best friend runs the place. And of course it was so cold with all the snow on the ground that some of the water is frozen. Next thing you know, the staff are using the thickest patches of ice like a slip-and-slide or a skating rink. We had to shut down the whole place, just to keep those idiots from breaking their necks. My name is Johansson, by the way,” she sticks her hand out “You’re going to be staying with me, Agents Walker and Crawford. We thought it would be better if we didn’t split you up from each other. You know, kept everything under one roof.”

Jack smiles humourlessly and shakes her hand. The grip is firm, but chilled, as if she has had her hands thrust up to the wrist in a freezer or a snow-drift for an hour. Quickly, he lets go and tries to wipe the sensation from his palms on Winston’s fur.

Tahcawin holds on for an even shorter amount of time before she, too, is absently scratching Winston on the top of his head.

Sheriff Dun’s reddened face appears in the door-frame “Johansson, find me a squad-car. I need flashing lights. Santiago’s having a serious episode.”

“Can’t you call an ambulance?”

The sheriff gives Tahcawin a surprisingly sour look “I don’t need that bill on my record.”

Sighing, Johansson flashes them a knowing look that is far too intimate for Jack’s liking- especially considering the length of their acquaintanceship, and the places of cringing embarrassment it is sure to travel to in the future.

He looks at his partner frankly and says in a low voice “I won’t blame you if you decide to camp in the car for the duration.”

“We can take turns. Like shifts. One of us takes the car every other night.”

For the first time, the two agents smile at each other.


	8. “Are you telling me that I’m offending you, or that you want to roleplay ‘Psycho’ with me?”

From the medical knowledge that one gleans when they socialise with forensic scientists, Will can tell both of the women are in the early stages of hypothermia. He has Margot shed what seems to be an endless series of coats and sweaters, each one of them with a large stain of blood. At first he is concerned that she has sustained a wound serious enough to soak through so many layers of fabric, but he realises that she is unscathed once she, with a gay woman’s modesty around men (which is to say in Will’s experience, a total refusal to be ashamed of her body or coy about her nakedness) sheds all of her ratty clothing, he notes that she has only sustained superficial scrapes.

Whatever horrors Margot and Chiyoh battled through to arrive here, Chiyoh bore the brunt of it. By her own design, no doubt.

“I’m freezing.” says Margot.

She folds her arms over herself and shifts her weight on the balls of her feet. There is no shame, but there is a shyness. The kind of shyness that follows one into a stranger’s house, or into a good friend’s house for the first time. Will cannot decide which way Margot feels about the house she has just found. Neither can she, apparently.

“You have the beginnings of hypothermia.” he says as he goes to the cabinet, and pulls out several of the spare blankets.”

Margot examines the reddened tips of her fingers “What about her?”

Chiyoh is stretched out on the couch, still fully dressed in her snow-damp clothes. Her skin is pale and bloodless and quite close to the shade of white that covers the ground. 

“How long has Chiyoh been this bad?”

Margot takes a proffered blanket and wraps herself up in it quickly “I don’t know. She never complains. She won’t let me help when she’s hurt…is that her name, Chiyoh? She never told me.”

“Help me.”

Between the two of them, they make a pile of Chiyoh’s discarded clothes on the floor pretty quickly. The blood in between her layers is some of hers, as well as a myriad of strangers’. When they get to the final layer, Margot makes an alarming discovery on Chiyoh’s upper left leg.  
She points out what is clearly a bullet wound to Will. The wound was bound with a haste that suggests that they must have been running for their lives at the time that it was sustained, using only a scrap of fabric (that accounts for a torn sleeve on one of her sweaters) to keep the blood in. it hasn’t done a very good job, either.

“I didn’t know about that. Goddamn her. Goddamn her…what did she think I was going to do if she died on me? God…God…”

Margot sinks to the floor in a puddle of blankets. Pulling the covers about herself tightly, she makes a cocoon for herself. Her shape is swamped and lost in the folds of the blankets. Since she has no pressing injuries to treat, Will leaves her there to gather herself.  
Chiyoh is the one who is in dire straits.

It has been seven years since Will saw her last. The years do not show on her face, but they do show on her hands, once he has wrested them out of the scarred leather gloves she wears. The knuckles are cracked with scars. Her fingernails have turned a colour that is exactly between grey and red, with the filth and the blood the ordeal and the ordeals before it have accumulated. The tip of the forefinger of her left hand is gone, as is an entire joint on her right thumb.

She may lay prone like the frozen princess in the tower, waiting on the kiss to wake her up, but she has the hands of the dragon who has been guarding the maiden the whole time.

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

Margot’s voice is muffled in the blankets, which makes her words sound childish and strange “You know. Hannibal. Where is he?”

“Asleep. Upstairs.”

“Nice ring.”

Will can’t help but glance at the gold ring on his left hand “Thank you.”

“Is she going to die?”

Peeling back the make-shift bandage, Will inspects the wound. The wound is not so much a wound as it is a small crater. The bullet must have hit her at some kind of optimum angle, because the flesh bows inwards, like the sagging struts of an old spider-web. In the centre of it rests the spider itself. The bullet did not get very far through, and he can see it glinting, metal and dull and in fragments, less than an inch into the deep wound.

“No,” he decides “She isn’t.”

The wound must be fairly recent, going by the look. Also, there is no smell except for the bitter salt tang of blood. No infection yet.  
Chiyoh’s eyes wander underneath her eyelids. Her face is pale and drawn, turning a faint shade of yellow underneath a light sheen of sweat. The longer Will looks at her, the more apparent it becomes that he’s going to have to wake Hannibal up. 

On his own he has more than enough of the proper medical knowledge and resources to take care of the wound and whatever else she might be suffering. But the way every muscle in her is tensed, the way her nerves are drawn to the point of absolute tension- it couldn’t be more obvious that she has suffered mentally more than physically if she sat up and told Will that herself, with tears in her eyes. Assuming that Chiyoh is capable of something as basically emotional as tears. Will suspects not.

She’s going to need someone she loves to hold her hand, to talk to her while she is being treated. Most importantly, to be there when she wakes up.

But before Will can even inform Margot of his decision, there are light footsteps on the stairs.

Throwing the blankets back from her face, Margot looks up at him. Her expression is something like a plea. She doesn’t want to see the monster she and her family have been in hiding from for the last four years. Will wonders what insane circumstances have really driven them to their doorstep.  
The delirium these two women are sweating is somewhat infectious and he can’t quite make sense of what Margot has told him. Somebody has taken their child (what was his name?) and Alana and plans to kill them. Alright, fine, but what does that mean?

Girl comes in first. Then Hannibal, as casually as if he had been there at the door to greet the unexpected guests and is just returning from the kitchen to report on how the dinner is going. Oh, shit, the kitchen. Will’s going to have to keep Margot away from the fridge. He’s fairly certain there is at least one human appendage intact in a Tupperware container in the vegetable crisper, and some of the broth is left over from that marrow soup Hannibal made the other night.

“Good evening Margot.”

“Hi.” she says flatly. She looks at him like, instead of a polite greeting, he opened his mouth and spewed a mixture of ectoplasm and sewage from head-to-foot.

In some distant memory, almost five years ago, when they could only speak through tough plastic that Alana assured him even Hannibal couldn’t break with his bare hands, Will can sympathise with her disgust.

Hannibal crosses the room and crouches beside Chiyoh. Gesturing to the wound, Will steps back to give Hannibal the space he needs. 

Hannibal has an expression that Will hasn’t seen under this roof for a long time. That blank, almost formless, but always faintly amused mask he wore for most of the first few years that Will knew him. A mask of utter composure to go with his person-suit.  
It is unnerving to see him assuming that in the one place where Will thought he could be spared from seeing it again. Then again, remembering what monsters he and his husband have chosen to be always is disconcerting, when he is forced to connect with that unfortunate truth again.

“How long has she been injured?”

Margot watches him the way one predator watches another stealing its kill “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me she was hurt at all.”

“I take it that she found you? And tell me, Margot, what exactly were your circumstances when Chiyoh happened upon you?”

“Desperate.”

If he had not known him for so long, and so intimately for the last four years, Will would not have noticed the shadow that passes over Hannibal’s face. It went by far too fast for the untrained eye to register. What’s more, Will knows what that shadow was.  
Hannibal isn’t sure whether he should be peeved that someone is hunting what he has already marked, or if he should be concerned that perhaps the only other couple that they can consider old friends are in a deep trouble.

Will straightens up and fetches the medical kit out of the closet. Christ, there’s a rifle in the umbrella stand. It occurs to Will that he will probably have to hide almost everything that can be considered a weapon to spare Margot the battle with what must be an overwhelming temptation to kill him and his husband while their guard is down- which it won’t be for a very long time, now that their house has been uncovered and visited by the spectres of the past.  
Without their permission, no less.

Hannibal accepts the kit and starts to clean the wound without a word.  
Sensing the atmosphere of growing anxiety from Margot, Will decides he had better get her out of the room before she starts to berate Hannibal.

“Margot, you should take a shower.”

She tenses up “Are you telling me that I’m offending you, or that you want to roleplay ‘Psycho’ with me?”

Will narrowly stops himself from rolling his eyes “You may not have noticed, but you’re covered in blood and dirt.”

“Don’t want me on your carpets?”

“Frankly? No. The bathroom is upstairs.”

When Margot gets up to follow him, she leaves a light dusting of the dirt that she tracked in on the throw-rug and a faint, still-wet blood stain closer to the hearth. Wonderful. Hannibal will be attacking that with bleach as soon as he is certain that Chiyoh is out of the reach of mortal danger.

Girl trots after Margot and Will.

Her love of horses must still dwarf all else, but she regards the Shiba with a marked interest “What’s her name?”

“Girl.”

“You named her?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t have any children, Will.”

She lets herself be shown into the bathroom without protestation. Her coverings start to fall before Will has a chance to close the door.  
Once the sound of water hitting the tiles starts up, Will goes to the landing and listens for sounds of distress in the living room. He has no intention of leaving Margot alone, when she could swoon or cave to the temptation to steal the straight-razor Hannibal shaves with from the cabinet, but neither does he want to abandon Hannibal in the front room with the half-dead Chiyoh.

So, he settles on the top step. Girl sits between his knees, choosing an optimum angle from which to be petted. Not wanting to miss out on the action, Actaeon trots out of the bedroom and wiggles under Will’s other arm.

“How is she?” he calls.

“Durable,” is the response “She will survive.”

About half a minute passes in silence.

Then, Margot yelps and shouts “Will! Which way is for hot water?”

 

(Several years earlier)

“Have you heard the news? We’re dead, now.”

Hannibal accepts the broadsheet from Will and examines the front-page with a practiced distaste, which Will has come to learn he reserves only for news articles about him. He is not like other killer, massaging his ego by collecting scraps about him, the rumours and wild speculation spun up for a pay-check. It is enough for Hannibal to have one fervent admirer-cum-partner, by now.

“We are also invisible.”

Will passes him the coffee he ordered- black, of course, because how else would a cultured killer take his coffee?

“Come again?”

He flips the paper around and gestures to the front page “Why do you think they would avoid using pictures of us? Our faces are quite familiar to the public eye by now. And if the powers that be truly wanted to confirm that we were dead instead of, say-”

Will glances around them “Lounging in a quaint coffee shop on the coast of Mexico.”

Hannibal nods “Then I can assure you our faces would be splashed over every available surface in the media. They would have the masses on a high-alert, searching for us in every crowd. A witch-hunt. And yet we find ourselves quite marginalised.”

“The story is on the front page of every single paper. Even the local Spanish papers are covered in the story.”

“The fact remains that it’s the Dragon on the cover of those papers.”

Will shrugs “So they want us to disappear. Why don’t we take them up on that?”

“It’s insidious, the way they wish to pretend we never were. What you and I have done is not the kind of thing that can be buried easily.”

“They’re trying.”

“Have you thought about why?”

“They want to hunt us?” suggests Will. Strangely, he feels no urge to survey the café for anyone who might be planted to watch them or find them. 

Over the last few weeks with Hannibal, Will has been exhausted, in agony, in ecstasies of rage and euphoria. In short, he has visited the most extreme peak of many of the major emotions, but never once has he felt unsafe with Hannibal. At risk, physically, yet, and he has certainly been aware of being surrounded by danger, but never like he needed to be concerned about that.  
He has found that, now that he has stopped fighting the truth of their relationship, Hannibal’s company is easily the most pleasant company he has enjoyed in a very long time. 

Hannibal picks up the small spoon from his coffee and lets the tip of the handle rest between Francis Dolarhyde’s eyes, which are wide and slightly manic even in the photo. He has been enlarged to dominate the entire page. To distract from the lack of what everyone wants to hear about; what they call ‘Los Maridos Asesinos’ in this region of the world. To engage the readers in the horror he has caused. Beneath the Dragon’s photo (a somewhat awkward, badly-lit candid of Dolarhyde at a college-age, because there was no mugshot to use) are the smiling, well-posed family photos of those that he murdered. 

“Not just to hunt us,” continues Hannibal, drawing the handle of the spoon across the Dragon’s throat “But to disappear us. This way, whatever way they may choose to dispose of us, there will be no tricks left to us. No question of trials that could result in a miscarriage of justice, nor cells from where we will still be able to speak to the world. This way once they find us what happens after that will be the final act.”

Will hums “That’s a comforting thought.”

Hannibal cocks any eyebrow “How so?”

“I’ve had enough of the FBI for one life-time. The next time we see them, it’ll be too soon.”

In the article, Will and Hannibal’s names are mentioned in passing as having disappeared en-route to another holding facility for Hannibal (not to assist in the investigation) and fallen victim to the Dragon’s ferocity. Apparently, in this version of the story, it was a select few, brave agents from the FBI itself that put the Dragon down.

Will can barely disguise his revulsion at the speed and thoroughness with which the Bureau seized the story and altered it, and neither can Freddie Lounds. Behind the spread of the broadsheet, Hannibal’s tablet sits, open to her page.

The claims are fantastic. Almost irresponsible, when compared to what the rest of the media are dutifully reporting. While the other outlets only mention the two of them to pronounce their death (a purported murder-suicide, which Will perpetrated for the sake of the world) Freddie Lounds barely acknowledges the Dragon’s role in the situation at all. She is far more interested in proposing theories, theories which she would not have been able to conjure or in some cases, when she draws eerily close to the truth, or deduct without going to the site itself and talking to some of the agents who saw Will push himself and his partner over the cliff.

The outlets that mention Will in a little more detail claim that he was the victim, survived by a loving wife (whose face Will has already begun to forget, to his mild horror) and step-son (his face lingers, for some reason) and kidnapped by Hannibal and the Dragon for their sick purposes. Freddie Lounds suggests Will as an equal partner in the venture, which is an untruth, as she is counting from the moment that Hannibal was stuck in his cell.  
Will can’t truly claim to have been Hannibal’s equal until he made the decision that, no, he was not going to allow the man to be shot, even if it was at the cost of his life and Hannibal’s too. That they were going to get away from the people and the places that knew them, and they were going to do it as a unit.

The others have pegged Hannibal as a sadistic killer, and Freddie has struck dangerously close to a well of truth by labelling him as ‘obsessed’ and ‘committed’ and ‘crazed’. If only she had used ‘love-sick’, then Will would have nothing to argue with.

“I must wonder how much longer Ms Lounds expects to get away with this sort of irresponsible reporting.”

Will laughs “As long as she can.”

“That may not be for much longer. Are you ready?”

“If you are.”

The two of them stand and collect their various beverages, the papers and the tablet. They leave no trace behind them, which will be their habit for the next year.  
Were the political climate of the country they were leaving that afternoon a little more open-minded, Will might have gathered his courage sufficiently to take the obvious invitation that Hannibal’s lone, free-hand is, as it hangs at his side, waiting to be filled with another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Excuse my clumsy Spanish. I'm only a quarter Puerto Rican- a Quaterican, if you will- and I'm not doing a very good job of getting into contact with my language heritage.


	9. Setting up shop in the spider's web

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The basic plot of the story is hammered out, as well as who is going to feature in it. But I'm still torn as to whether or not I should include Price and Zeller in the time-frame of the cult story...

The night has been long, winding and torturous, but Jack can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

That is to say, the light mounted on Johansson’s porch. Snow flits across the light in sheets. The house is large and full of butter-coloured lights, so it looks like the melted version of the stuff is leaking out all over the snow. In the yard stands a thick, slightly lop-sided snowman with five arms and several noses that have not been placed anywhere near an area that would make anatomical sense. It brandishes what is either a broom or a mop that had enough water left in its fibres to freeze in a roughly triangular shape.

From the windows of the car, Jack observes the flickering figures that walk in from of the glowing curtains. There are three of them, chasing each other around. From the low roar he can hear behind the wind-rattled windowpanes, it’s obviously Johansson’s significant other pursuing two small children in a mix of amusement and fury, presumably at the fact that they are still awake when the late night is about to give way into an early morning.

“Oh shit. What are they doing still awake?” mutters Johansson, then she turns to speak over her shoulder “I don’t know what my husband thinks he’s doing. He lets them stay up sometimes, when I’m running late.”

Sandwiched in with their luggage and, more awkwardly, each other, Tahcawin and Jack share another despairing look. Already, it has become a habit between them to do so. Jack suspects that if they do not walk away from this mission with at least a slight friendly affection for each other, then they will at least share something like that- an eternal bond forged by the incredible inconvenience and embarrassment that the kindness of strangers is about to put them through.

At the back of his mind, a part of him thanks God that Will Graham has chosen to disappear. If the FBI still had him situated under their thumb, it would definitely be him in the backseat with Jack (because somehow Winston claimed shot-gun) and Jack has no doubt that the ensuing, mounting anxiety of the situation as it degrades would probably send Will back to Chilton’s asylum. This time, with good reason.

Once they have pulled into one of the most cluttered garages Jack has ever seen, they all pile out of the car. Tahcawin nearly falls out in her eagerness to be liberated from the smell of children and the stains they leave behind that soaks into the very pores of every family car, and sets about brushing stray crumbs off of herself frantically. While giving her a pitying look, Jack nearly breaks his neck on child-sized, offensively pink bike which is stretched out in the narrow aisle between the car and boxes of tools that he assumes must belong to the father of the family.  
On the bright side, no one saw the bike at his feet, so Jack can easily pretend that he bobbed out of sight so rapidly because he saw his shoe was untied. 

They each take their suitcases and make their way around the aisles. Keeping a weathered eye out for more bikes that might sabotage his already tenuous grasp on his balance, Jack also makes a note of the collection of DIY and machismo that he is surrounded by. Whoever the husband is, he’s struggling with the fact that his wife is the one in the family that brings home the bread and uses a gun to do it. Probably bound to the house by a small child or an infant, or some kind of disability which allows him to climb all over the place with his tools in search of things to fix, but somehow prevents him from joining the work-force.  
Or maybe he’s just a house-husband who has a hobby that requires extensive equipment. Either one seems plausible.

Again, Jack can’t help but think of Will and what he did in his spare time. He would have gotten a little distracted from the case by the sea of materials that surround him. His mechanic’s mind drowning out the empathic disorder for just long enough for him to name a few of the boat engines on display and ask what kind of machine oil the husband prefers. Something like that.

“Jesus!”

Jack looks over in alarm just in time to see Tahcawin going down. At the last second, her long arm flops over the hood of the car and keeps her from smashing her face. She rises slowly, brushing grit from her front, and hefts a bike’s handlebars up. This one is black and emblazoned with some kind of bastardisation of the word ‘extreme’.

She blows a strand of hair from her lip “I’m alright.”

“Sorry,” says Johansson absently “My kids have the place booby-trapped. Watch out for skates around the stairs by the way. LaToya can’t get it through his head that people walk there and can slip on them- you know how it is with little kids.”

No, he doesn’t, and Jack is proud to report it. It may have been to do with marrying in his early thirties, when his career was what needed coddling and feeding and regular burping to ensure that it stayed alive and in his care, or it may have just been that he and Bella shared a similar distaste for the portion of the human race that screamed and shat all over the place, but they never had kids. Nor did they talk much about the possibility of children.

So, while Jack has ventured into many hells, the one that he steps into as Johansson beckons him into the noise is an altogether different kind and more terrifying because of it. The first thing he notices is the general disarray, on top of the noise.  
The kitchen reminds him of the way that the labs got when Zeller and Price were working on mass-murder cases. Piles of non-descript, insidiously grey things piled everywhere. A heinous smell that someone has tried many times to drown in cleaning products. High-pitched giggles thick in the air, but not issuing from two grown, professional men. From two children.

One is a boy and the other appears to be a girl, but Jack can’t be sure. They’ve both been scrubbed and packed into pyjamas, evidently hours before, but show no signs of exhaustion as they charge in and hug their mother around the legs.

They’re both screaming. It might be some kind of inanimate demand for food, or what it sounds like when someone with tiny vocal cords screams “MOMMY” at the top of an incredibly high vocal range.

Winston pulls his ears back at the noise and retreats behind Jack’s legs. Another thing he shares in common with Jack; if there are children around, he generally doesn’t like to be around them. And, for some reason with his mind snapping back to his old friend, Jack can’t help but picture Will in Tahcawin’s place. While she stands there with her shoulders squared and her face set in a grim determination to get through this as fast as possible, Will would be out the door and digging himself an igloo in the snow on the lawn.

He’d tell Jack that he would be far more comfortable in sub-zero temperatures than in a house where there were noises like a tornado siren being beaten with another siren. He’d have to be bullied back into the house and forced to make small talk with the host couple, and maybe even acknowledge the kids. People with easily irritated anxiety and people who make it their business to irritate don’t mix that well, most of the time.  
Yes, Jack thinks to himself, Will would be digging in the snow by now and I’d be bedding down with him.

Finally the last, shrill note dwindles into oblivion. What is possibly the girl of the two lifts her hands in a clear demand to be picked up. Before she touches her daughter, Johansson takes the gun off her belt, removes the bullets and stashes them in the front of her shirt. Since he’s thinking about old friends, Jack remembers vividly all of the times he had seen Beverly stash a spare cartridge or two in what she called ‘a woman’s special little pocket’.  
God, he misses her. He misses them all.

“Mama!” hoots the little girl “Who are they?”

“Malin! I’ll thank you to remember your manners.” she turns and beams, inviting the agents to appreciate how beautiful her children are. The boy skulks behind her leg.

They are quite cute, as children go. Jack doesn’t really consider himself qualified to appreciate how adorable the larval stages of the human race can be, but even he notices they are breath-takingly adorable.  
The girl has a lot of wiry black-brown hair, staring green eyes and brown skin that reminds him of the way the foam and the coffee-colours mix together on top of a cappuccino. Her brother has the same eyes, hair and skin, except for a dash of freckles across the bridge of his small nose.

Bella never could summon much affection for children, but she might have been compelled to stuff these little angels under her jacket and spirit them back into their household for her own.

“Hi! I’m Malin!” the girl extends a chubby hand.

Jack shakes it like he’s greeting a superior “Hello Malin. My name is Crawford.”

“Crawdad?”

“Crawford.”

Johansson glances at the child hiding behind her “You want to say hi?”

The boy is older than his sister- old enough to be in the schooling system by now, but Jack can only guess at how old that is, never having had kids of his own to stick into schools.  
He musters his courage and mutters “Hi.”

Tahcawin puts her hands on her knees to get closer to his level “What’s your name?”

“I’m Junior.”

The father bustles into the kitchen, an average-sized man with unremarkably handsome features, and scoops up his son. Like his daughter did a moment before, he sticks out a stocky hand and shakes with each of the agents in turn.

“I’m Dion,” he says with a large smile that kind of makes Jack want to hit him “You folks are it, then? Great, great, I didn’t know where we were going to fit all of the agents. The way the station was talking I figured we’d have about half of the FBI in here.”

“Are you the Senior?” asks Tahcawin.

“What? Oh, no, Junior here is Sharon Junior. My wife is Sharon.”

Jack steps in to spare Tahcawin from any further awkwardness “I’m Agent Crawford and this is Agent Walker.”

“Who’s that? Behind your legs?”

“This is Winston.”

“Is he an agent too?” asks Malin.

“Sure is,” lies Jack “He’s trained to find things that we can’t find with our human noses.”

Winston isn’t actually trained to do that, to the extent of Jack’s knowledge. He was little more than a puppy when Will took him in, so he doubts there was a chance for a career as a sniffer-dog before he came to live in Wolf Trap. What Winston does for Jack is pure chance- he picks up the smell of rot and, knowing that Jack is always happy to have him discover a cadaver, follows the smell and takes Jack to it.  
In this way, they have found a lot of dead bodies for the FBI when they are called up.  
It also means that Jack gets a lot of dead birds and rats on his living room floor and a tail-wagging Winston waiting for a treat. Take the good with the bad.

“Where’s the other one?” Johansson asks her husband “He in bed already?”

He nods “LaToya’s been in bed for a few hours now. If you’re gonna go in to kiss him goodnight, watch your feet. His Legos are out and they nearly killed me when I tried to go in.”

The agents are shown through the house to their room, which, yes, they will be sharing. As Jack is led through the plain but exceptionally toy-cluttered house, he begins to think of all the ways this set-up can go wrong.  
House full of vulnerable, young children. Guns, graphic pictures of dead bodies. A cult on the loose, and the only two FBI agents the Bureau could be bothered to stick on the job are staying in the home of one of the officers who is presumably assigned to the case.

This couldn’t have gone worse if someone had planned it this way.

But there must be some kind of god of mercy on Jack’s side, because the room has twin beds. At least this way there doesn’t have to be a gladiator-style slap-up to determine who gets an actual mattress to their back every night.

“Call me if you need anything,” says Dion brightly “Good night agents. We’re glad to have you here.”

When the door closes, Jack hears the sound of bars slamming shut instead.

“Well.” says Tahcawin “This…this is going to be an unorthodox investigation, sir.”

“Awkward is the word you’re looking for. Which…which bed do you want?”

“The one that Winston isn’t on.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Winston, get off that quilt. It’s probably an heirloom.”

“Sir, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go to the bathroom now.” She casts a single, despairing glance at the quaint little marble affair they’re going to be sharing for the foreseeable future “I’ll try to keep my mess to a minimum.”

Before she disappears into the room to start that unfathomable female ritual- whichever one it is that keeps most of the women Jack has ever shared a living-space with in the throne-room for an upwards of thirty minutes every time they close the door behind them- they each dump their bags on their beds.  
Jack’s are twin, small and practical, one containing his necessities and the other, half his and half Winston’s; Tahcawin has an absolutely massive, fantastically shabby monster of a bag that looks more bear than suitcase and shows no signs of being shy or ashamed of its condition.

Something about the haphazard way she has packed in her clothes, clothes that were well-rumpled before she put them into the bag, and the way every other available inch of space is dominated by books makes Jack want to like her a little more than he currently does. When she reaches into the depths of the clothes pile and pulls out an electric iron, it is confirmed for Jack.  
Tahcawin is, as he expected, an eccentric. And he likes her just fine.

She catches him staring and shrugs sheepishly “I’m not a very accomplished house-keeper, sir, and I find that when I have to borrow someone else’s iron it gets that salty, mineral crud-stuff all over my clothes.”

“Hey, I’m toting a dog and a bag of chew toys around with me. You don’t have to justify a thing to me.”

She smiles with a little less shyness than she has before and sets the iron on the nightstand, then scoops up a pair of blue pyjamas, a toiletry bag and whirls away into the bathroom, kicking her heels off as she goes.

Jack then decides that he neither needs to wash or change before sleep. He places his suitcases on the floor, kicks off his shoes, socks, removes his tie and jacket so he won’t wake up in the middle of the night tangled up in them, and buries himself under the blankets. They smell of age and attics and the grandmothers that knitted them a few hundred years ago. Immediately, Winston wriggles underneath the hospital corners and inserts himself under the covers, making it look as if Jack has a small man hunched over on his kneecaps.  
Jack has just about enough time to formulate a complaint against his dog for putting his wet dog-nose on his stomach, but falls asleep in between completing the thought and opening his mouth.

He dreams of the dead, scattered about him in drifts the way fallen leaves will gather in the gutters during the height of autumn.

 

(Several years earlier)

Zeller and Price get to know, but only because Jack decides they should. 

The last three years have done far more to separate them through work, differing social lives and colleagues than any kind of trauma ever could. The men that are waiting outside his office, somehow knowing that they would have been summoned anyway, are practically strangers the first time he looks. They do not look natural, as they file into the room after him. Jack figures out what it is that is bothering him.

Not the three extra years that Zeller is wearing well, but are wreaking havoc on Price’s hairline. It’s just the absences in the room. The two of them must notice it as well, from the stiff and awkward way they stand. Beverly should be here. So should Will.

Hannibal, too.

But they are not, and that is the central reason that the three of them are gathered at all, after so many years spent strategically avoiding each other to avoid the unpleasant memories that each other’s company would conjure back. 

“They’re not dead.”

Zeller’s face crumples; Price’s brightens.

“Did Will-” begins Price “Did he call-”

Zeller starts at the same time too “They say they fell off a cliff-”

Jack gives them a stern look that is enough to shut them both up. It’s such a familiar, well-worn moment that it relaxes him, just a little bit. Still an amazing feat, considering the circumstances.

“They didn’t fall.”

“They were thrown?” guesses Price uneasily.

“They were shot.” says Zeller, grim and ashen-faced.

“You seem to be missing the major point here, men. They aren’t dead.”

“How could they survive that?”

“What did they survive?”

“What happened?”

“Where are they?”

“Listen, what I’m about to tell you does not leave this room under any circumstances. If it were to leave, it wouldn’t be a simple matter of losing our careers. Think more along the lines of federal prison. Or death row. Or a clean-up, whichever one is fastest for Purnell to organise.”

As one, the two men swallow nervously.

With nothing left to get through, Jack delivers his news reluctantly “I’m sure you already know the story…the Bureau had a tracking beacon in one of the cars. Someone along the line had predicted that Dolarhyde was going to track them down, Will and…and so they took some extra measures against that eventuality that meant that it was very easy for us to track them down. We followed them to one of Dr Lecter’s safe-houses and got there just in time to see Will deliver the fatal blow to Dolarhyde.”

Price shifts his weight nervously “In self-defence?”

“Yes, but excessively. He cut his throat wide open. Destroyed it, in fact.”

Zeller’s eyes swivel in their sockets, as if he’s searching for something in the room to settle his churning stomach. Jack understands his pain. If he had not seen Will do it himself, he would not be able to connect Will with such extravagant violence either- no matter what he did to that poor, delusional would-be assassin on the bear skeleton.  
But he saw it. Will Graham, black with blood in the moonlight, pick himself up from the kill that was still warm on the dirt and go to Hannibal. From that embrace, Jack saw that this was the culmination of a war Hannibal had been fighting since the day he met Will almost four years ago.

Even now, after a month of pondering that one night, every night since, he couldn’t say for sure which one of them has won the war.

“Is it true that he pushed Hannibal off the cliff?” asks Price, so wanting to believe it.

Jack almost can’t bear to dash his hopes. He’s heard the same strain of rumour charging through the offices. The people who knew Will don’t want to believe that he could succumb to the things that he had seen. The monster he had danced with for so long.  
He soldiered on through three years and came so close to getting away from it. 

If Hannibal were around to hear what Jack was thinking, he’d make some kind of witticism about Icarus’s situation being reversed.

“No. He saw us.”

Saw him. Looked right at Jack, with blood in his eyes.

“And he pushed himself and Dr Lecter off the cliff. Deliberately took himself over too. Let that sink in…just understand that if he wanted forgiveness or redemption for what he did, what he’s done- and believe me there are plenty of things that he’s done that the Bureau doesn’t know about, and never will…he would have just pushed Hannibal and been done with it. Will isn’t the self-punishing type, when he can help it.”

Price has grown angry, but the anger doesn’t seem to be directed at Jack or Zeller “Are you trying to say that they did some kind of Shakespearian, star-crossed lovers suicide?”

“No,” says Jack sternly “I’m telling you it was an escape.”

“How can you be sure they’re not dead?” asks Zeller “Just because the bodies haven’t been found doesn’t mean that they’re still alive.”

“We did find one body on the beach. It wasn’t either of them, but it was one of ours. We’re not sure whether it was Will or Dr Lecter that killed the officer, but their neck was twisted all the way around.”

Making a choked noise, Zeller steadies himself by leaning on the corner of Jack’s desk “Wait…wait…you’re talking about Marjane Sakib, aren’t you? But she was shot. She was shot by the Dragon.”

After repeating the same, stale lie for so many weeks, it is refreshing to be able to tell the truth, as bitter as it is “No. That’s not what happened, but for all intents and purposes it has to be. The officers and agents we had were split up on the beach. Officer Sakib was doing one last sweep of a derelict light-house on the grounds and she didn’t come back. When she was found, her head was on backwards.”

The angle at which her head had been titled was extreme and gut-wrenching. It almost looked as if her head might have been ripped off entirely, if not for her head-scarf securing it in place.  
Jack can guess that it was Will. Hannibal is far more surgical in his methods. More caring with the bodies, if he has not specifically picked the victim out for some rudeness, as he did with Abigail Hobbs’ friend.

But the murder that they had found was brutal, swift, and inexperienced, although it was clear that the perpetrator knew what he was doing. In theory only, up to that point. In practice, the way the body was splayed out suggested no apology for what he had done.

A large stain of blood on the floorboards told them that Hannibal was bleeding, very badly, so Jack assumes that Will was just defending what was his. A predator, growling in front of his wounded mate.

There is little to say to Zeller and Price, after that. 

They have no common ground between them anymore. No shared work to unite them, not for at least the last two years. The two men leave and take separate directions in the hall. From the way Zeller’s shoulders are squared, and the way Price keeps looking back over his shoulder at his former lab partner, Jack suspects there will be some heavy drinking tonight for both parties.

And as for what Jack will be doing tonight? He and Winston and going to go for a walk near the woods, and maybe go back to Wolf Trap for the last time on the weekend to pick up some things that still smell of Will that Winston can sleep on.

Jack is well aware that the only other living thing in his house right now, aside from the odd house-spider, is a dog and he should not be looking forward to returning home. Who knows how much longer he will be able to keep his job? Purnell welcomed him back, of course, once he had ‘ended’ Will and Hannibal, as they were saying in the offices, but Jack does not intend to stay here for very long.

Would it really be so bad, he wonders, if he could just stay home with his new dog?  
If he could just live out the rest of his days in peace, the way Will and Hannibal are surely going to do?

Jack doesn’t think so, but he doubts he will ever get the chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People with small children, I apologise for the campaign against them in this chapter. Jack's just a slightly bitter old man who finds it confronting to look at the larval stage of his species and think 'i was that tiny' and 'who are these kids going to be, when they're fully-fledged people? how many of them will grow up to kill?'  
> Also, pardon the stereotyping of women taking a long time in the bathroom. I don't necessarily mean this to relate to us having to put on gallons of make up and brush our hair and take a bajillion selfies before we allow the outside world to see us, but I was just trying to introduce a sort of gender-fuelled tension into the living space, that will be more developed between Jack and Tahcawin in the future.  
> I'm fully aware there are women that go in and out so fast the bathroom door doesn't have time to swing shut behind them. And women who leave the door open for all to see. My sister is one of those. Alright, that's more than enough information


	10. The mentality of guard dogs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I can't think of a single interesting thing to put into the A/Ns  
> Not a single flipping thing

Chiyoh is in a lot of pain when she wakes up.

Her impeccable sense of grace and decorum will not allow her to curse in the company of others, but the way her face is wrinkled in the exertion of pushing herself upright, on the couch, up onto her elbows, and her fingers are clenched into her palms. So tightly that they carve little furrows in the already damaged flesh of her palms.  
By the time she wakes up, Hannibal has not yet had the time to treat the cuts on her hands. They seemed superficial compared to the small crater the bullet had left in her leg. 

Chiyoh stares at the bandage on her thigh for a moment and winces in pain, as she explores the edges of the gauze with some scuffed fingers.  
She then takes in the room, the furniture she has been stretched out upon. Tasteful, minimalist in some ways, while spiced with the grace of the Old World in others.

There’s a fire in a marble hearth and a man beside the fire, though he does not seem to be taking any enjoyment from the heat.

At first, she isn’t sure that it is him. Chiyoh would know him anywhere, of course. Her natural vigilance and obsessive compulsion to protect him have combined into an eagle-eyed, radar-like sense for when he is near, to the point that she can pick him out in a crowd of thousands with the naked eye, even if his back is turned.  
Still, the Hannibal at the fire is not her Hannibal. 

A portrait of what Hannibal once was. She can still smell the blood on him. The proclivity for violence in the extreme, coupled with the gentle and smug assurance that he is better than everyone in the room in some way. It is still there, written in his face for those who know how to read him.  
But there are other things that were never there before.

Chiyoh has yet to see Hannibal in person since he became a married man. The ring on his finger looks alien to her, though it fits him naturally. The other things in his face are natural, flattering additions too. Even when contrasted against the ugliness he carries, the beauty that has been added to him by this house and the marriage taking place underneath his roof has made him a likeness of what she once knew.

A brilliant likeness, painted by someone who knew him intimately and worked skilfully to do him justice. But a likeness all the same.

She is half-expecting that he will not answer when she calls his name.

“Hannibal.”

He looks up. His eyes crease at the edges as he smiles. When did he get those, she wonders? Not wrinkles, but smile-lines. He has never had those before.

“How do you feel?”

Hesitant to complain, Chiyoh decides to lie “Better.”

In truth, she feels as he must have felt when Will pitched them both off the cliff. Every last piece of her is either burning with pain or aching.  
She didn’t see it, but once she had heard the true account of what had happened she saw the fall from the great height, the fall from grace to whatever it was that Will had found at the bottom of the cliff, so clearly in her mind it was as if she had taken the fall with them.

“How long ago were you shot?”

She struggles to remember. The days with Margot have blurred into one long sweep of blood-stained snow and pain, at her expense and the expense of others.  
She could have been shot today, yesterday, the day before or the week before. It is all the same to her. The pain has been so constant and that she barely noticed the more grievous injury on her leg, until she and Margot had to run from something or someone, and that happened quite a bit more than she would have liked.

“I don’t remember. Two, maybe three days. Where is Margot?”

Hannibal nods towards the staircase to the upstairs. 

Will Graham is posted on the bottom step, like a gargoyle. The lighting makes him monstrous, as well as some other, self-contained quality that is also new to Chiyoh. While she has managed to check in on Hannibal once or twice over the past few years, usually without his knowledge or consent at any point, but she has never once had the desire to see what became of Will Graham since Hannibal carried him away from the slaughter at Muskrat Farm.

Seeing him almost seven years later, Chiyoh wishes there were some way to retrieve the old Will Graham. This one still has the appearance of youth, of guarded intelligence and suspicion that his younger counter-part did. The part of her that appreciates architectural beauty or the finesse of touch in fine art notes that he has aged very well, to the extent that he does not seem to have aged at all.  
She would have said that the last seven years had been gentle and uneventful for him, if she couldn’t smell the blood on him.

See it on him. 

People like Hannibal never wash away what is splashed on them during their crimes. Now that Will is a person like Hannibal, or rather, the kind of thing that packs itself into a human-form to blend into the teeming masses, Chiyoh can see that he wears the bloodstains too.  
From the way he holds himself, the way his eyes meet hers only briefly before returning to Hannibal’s back, where they rested before, suggests to her that he might be able to see the blood on him as well.

It occurs to her that Hannibal is talking to her.

“Chiyoh? Can you hear me?”

Blinking hard, Chiyoh wipes away a tear that wells up on her eyelashes and rubs it away between her fingers in disgust “Yes. I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked if you would mind allowing me to look at the rest of you. I’m concerned there might be a wound that I missed. I did not think it appropriate to be flipping you over and about while you slept.”

There is a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead, and Will’s presence is doing little to help her relax. At some point in the last seven years, his presence has changed from that half-apologetic, half-irritated kind of light he used to throw off to a creeping, searching sensation. Water filling in a cave at the high-tide, numbing, bringing with it darkness and a promise of a drowning, should anyone get in its way.

“I am fine.” she says absently, her tongue thick and dehydrated.

Hannibal hands her a glass of water so cold that the glass is sweating condensation. The moment the first drop touches her cracked lips, she tosses manners to the wind and downs it in loud, painful gulps that remind her of just how sore her throat is.  
Yesterday, she spent a good amount of the time screaming for Margot at the top of her voice. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have bothered to raise her voice and just tracked her lost companion through the snow, but they were the beginnings of what she was sure was a blizzard (which turned out to be just a lot of wind, magnified by the tunnel of trees) in a dark and unfamiliar terrain. They had to shout and shout and shout until they managed to follow each other’s voices and reunite, and by that time Chiyoh had broken something down there, in the back of her throat.

She can still taste the blood. With the air of someone who is being picked up after an embarrassing fall to the ground, she informs Hannibal of this.  
As soon as Hannibal has retrieved the glass and had her open her mouth, announcing that she will be fine if she refrains from shouting for a few days, Will gets up and goes to the kitchen. On the way, he passes Hannibal and takes the now empty, proffered glass without having to look. Nor does Hannibal look up to make sure that Will has noticed it. 

The exchange is silent of words, but not on their faces. Chiyoh knows Hannibal well enough to track the tiny changes- the way the corner of his mouth quirks up into the smallest smile as his fingers brush his husband’s on the glass.

She is glad of the distraction, when Margot limps down the stairs. Swathed in two, thick white towels about her shoulders and still-dripping body, Margot settles beside Chiyoh on the couch. She does not seem to mind being in a state of undress in front of Hannibal, nor does she seem to mind that Chiyoh is being examined right next to her, albeit with the utmost concern for what little modesty there is to preserve with her just in her underwear.  
Smelling of men’s shampoo and soap and clean, hot water, she looks like a coma patient. Catatonic with her eyes open.

It recalls the man to Chiyoh. The penultimate survivor of the dinner party that ate Misha. Dead or dying on the inside, starved of touch (the touch that matters, at any rate, since Alana Bloom has been gone for two months now), but waiting all the while for her chance, when the door of the cage is finally left open in some moment of oversight or foolishness.  
Not dead yet, then. Still some vestigial hope with which Chiyoh might coax her back into conscious thought.

In the kitchen, a kettle screams.  
She listens to Will removing it from the burner and pouring two cups of tea. He returns a moment later, with two steaming mugs that throw the scent of jasmine and honey into the air. He must have brought that trick into the marriage on his own, because Chiyoh has never known Hannibal to take his tea with honey before.

Accepting her cup gingerly, wary of burning the fingers that are still numb from spending so long in the cold, she watches with dismay as Margot drifts back to life. The steaming mug of tea held under her nose drags her back into reality. She comes reluctantly.

Wherever she had gone inside her mind, she must have been with her wife and child.

Margot accepts the cup “The water pressure was exquisite. And I like your dogs.”

The thought of Hannibal keeping dogs, or anything that sheds at all, is so ridiculous that Chiyoh wants to laugh. But at the mention of them, said dogs trot down the stairs single-file and brush themselves up against Will’s legs. One of them, a remarkably ugly Shiba, peels away and sits at Hannibal’s feet perfectly casually.

So, apparently, married Hannibal doesn’t mind a little bit of fur on his furniture. 

She finds this simultaneously disconcerting and comforting.

Margot finishes her tea quickly, then busies her hands with fiddling with the handle of her warm mug. She stares off into space, but not to the depth which she reached before. Likewise, Chiyoh drinks quickly. Later, she is sure she will be ravenous. For now, she appreciates the feeling of a hot liquid hitting her empty stomach.

What had caused her to faint earlier, she cannot be sure of. It must have been the relief to have finally arrived, although Chiyoh plans to leave as soon as she can persuade Hannibal that she must be allowed to move on- if, indeed, he intends to try to stop her at all, whether it is for her own good or for his amusement.  
It might have been the sight of Will, framed in the doorway.

Even now it is only just registering in her mind that that was indeed Will, as she plays back the faint, fogged memory in her mind. To her, the figure in the doorway looked monstrous. She smelled the blood, then saw it, then became aware of a vaguely human shape underneath it all.  
And then the snow rushed up to meet her and the world, mercifully, grew dark, so she no longer had to look at the thing standing in the golden light. Between her and safety. Between her and Hannibal- the Hannibal she was sure was waiting, but who she now knows to be a little more than a memory. And even then, perhaps only in her memories.

“I am very tired.” she says out loud, without meaning to.

Neither is it a request to be taken to a bed or left in peace, but Hannibal takes it as such. In some way he senses her fear. Perhaps she is being far less subtle about the petrifying, gut-wrenching effect the mere presence of his husband in her peripheral has, because he places a hand on Will’s shoulder before he goes. Clearly asking him to stay where he is.

“I’m gonna turn it too,” says Margot, and she seems surprised to find herself speaking too “Unless there’s something you guys need to know right now, about what’s been happening.”

“I have the impression that this story will be better-told when the whole thing can be related in one sitting. Please, allow yourself to rest, Margot.”

She regards Hannibal with a kind of disgust, tempered with fondness “I forgot what you sound like. Can you believe that? I can’t. I can’t believe that I got you out of my head for even a second, now that I see you again.”

Still, she allows him to hold her arm to steady her on the way up. Chiyoh follows behind at a respectful distance. Part of her is angry with him for not taking her arm instead. The other half is grateful, as she now has his back to stare at. If she was only looking ahead at the hallway, she would undoubtedly turn back to look at Will again.

 

Will is about to drop off, when Hannibal comes back and surprises him.

The jolt is just what he needs to awaken his dulled senses. He moves sluggishly, but far enough over that Hannibal can squeeze onto the couch beside him. He does not need that much space, anyway, as it is only Will.

Hannibal settles with his shoulder flush to his husband’s. That is not quite close enough for Will, so he lowers his head into Hannibal’s lap and closes his eyes. Immediately, Hannibal’s fingers are in his hair. Tracing the nape of his neck, around the knots caused by stress that no amount of this will relieve. Reaching his jaw, every now and then, only to retreat to somewhere like the topmost vertebrae or the curve of Will’s shoulder.

“You were right, by the way.”

Will looks up at him “Hmm?”

“When you said that the guest room would do better with twin beds than one queen-sized. It is a good thing we deferred to your judgement. Your foresight was excellent.”

“They’re not spooning, then?”

Hannibal smiles “No, dear, they made for separate beds immediately. I imagine they have grown quite tired of sharing each other’s body-heat.”

“How strange,” says Will, reaching up to cup Hannibal’s hand as it rasps along his jaw again “How long do you think they were out there?”

“Months, perhaps. Weeks at the very least.”

“Alana is in trouble, according to Margot.”

“You sound quite reluctant to believe her. Are you afraid they’re here to ask for our help?”

Will frowns “Well I’m fairly certain they’re not here to see how we’re doing, Hanni.”

His husband’s face crumples in disgust “Would you not-”

“Sorry,” he says, without an ounce of feeling “You’re happy to see Chiyoh again, aren’t you?”

If Hannibal were the kind of person to shrug, he would be doing it “I suppose I should be excited at the prospect of revisiting our friendship in person, shouldn’t I? But then I must wonder, is it not the distance that makes the bond the most attractive and thrilling?”

“Thrilling?” repeats Will “Quote me a myth or a parable, Hannibal, you sound like the blurb of a crime novel.”

He decides to indulge Will’s sass, where he might usually punish such things with a light pinch on the back of the neck, or, if he’s feeling a little more playful, a kiss on the tip of his nose. Having two half-deranged, half-catatonic spectres of their past unconscious in the guest room is affecting the mood, however, so Hannibal only humours him.

“I’m sure the subject of ‘Für Elise’ enjoyed the piece far more than she would have enjoyed reciprocating her admirer’s affections.”

Will casts back, to the foggy high-school years and recalls a little piece of trivia that his music teacher assured them was going to help them later in life. It was true, but he doubts the teacher had it in mind that Will would be using it to tease his cannibal husband for one of his witticisms.

“Wasn’t that piece published with massive alterations forty years after Beethoven died?”

This time, Hannibal does tweak the back of his neck “I attempting to avoid a star-crossed relationship as pedestrian as Anthony and Cleopatra.”

“Why is it that you’re thinking of all the romantic relationships? Should I feel threatened?”

“Maybe.” says Hannibal lightly.

Hannibal kisses Will’s shoulder, but he keeps it fleeting and light. On any other night, the fire in the hearth and the soft snow-fall outside would be creating quite a different, more visceral reaction in Hannibal. He likes it when the world outside is more distant than usual. Muted by snow and the smothered in a cold night.  
If only the guest-bedroom were empty, the kiss would be far less chaste than it is. But Will’s husband is not the kind that instigates anything steamy with two old friends, possibly enemies, depending on what they want, are upstairs. 

While Will is glad that he will not have to fend off Hannibal’s affections for the sake of his and the women’s dignity, he also wishes that he did not have to. He wishes more than anything that he could let Hannibal undress him in front of the fire and do what the atmosphere demands they should. That is, after all, kind of the whole reason he pitched them off the cliff.  
So they could be together in peace.

Apparently, the world that he fell from when he fell from that cliff does not wish to give them up so easily. Jack Crawford is closing in, hopefully without the knowledge that he is about to enter into another game of cat-and-mouse with his two least favourite murderers. At least this time, Will is certain that he will be one of the cats, as oppose to one of the mice that the cats bat to each other, back and forth between out-stretched claws.

As if Jack Crawford’s impending appearance were not foretelling enough of a certain doom, they have Chiyoh and Margot turn up on their doorstep on the same night. Will has not seen Chiyoh for almost seven years, although he is sure she has seen him more recently than that. The woman did her best not to reveal much about herself in the short time she and Will had before she, you know, flung him from the back of a moving trans-European train into the unforgiving cold, but Will’s empathic disorder has made a detective of him.

An involuntary Sherlock Holmes who could not help but piece together the scene of the crime just by looking at it, and Chiyoh was a rather impressive crime. Her affection for Hannibal, mixed with the loyalty and the compulsive personality that lead her to stand by that man’s guard for who knows how many years makes her a dangerous, determined guard-dog. Not one that will always stand by her master’s side, but Will is sure she has been watching them from a darkened wood with a gun on her hip on more than one occasion.

And as for Margot? They should still be on relatively friendly terms.

In the three or so years that Will spent in a fierce denial of any time that he had spent combatting Hannibal Lecter, mentally, physically, emotionally, he saw little of his old friends and his old life, which was the way he preferred it.  
Margot and Alana were far too busy with their young son and that newly-wed bliss to bother with Will. Also, it was Alana’s responsibility to keep one of the most catastrophic serial killers in global history under lock and key, so she kind of had a full schedule. 

When one is trying to keep Atlas crushed underneath the weight of the sky, the brother Titans that would seek to free them should not be sought out for a cup of coffee and a chat to catch up.

Now that he’s thinking about Margot, it has inevitably lead him to think about Molly. Two or so years of marriage, after what was probably one of those ‘whirl-wind romance’ things he has heard so much about, he can summon little affection for her. Perhaps it has to do with the changes in his views of the world- that is to say, allowing and acknowledging that those views are vastly different, darker and altogether colder than most people’s.

Or maybe it’s just because he is sitting in his husband’s arms with a blanket of snow outside and an inviting hearth in front of him, that he cannot summon up any affection for Molly and the son they once shared.  
That is probably it.

With effort, he manages to bring himself out of the passive, brooding state that he has been lulled into by the flickering fire-light and his husband’s somewhat more substantial warmth.  
“I haven’t been having any night-terrors lately, have I?” 

“Not that I have seen.”

“If I had one, then you would know.”

Will’s night-terrors are a grand affair. No screaming- he stays utterly silent most of the time. But there is a lot of tossing, turning, sometimes kicking if Hannibal isn’t out of the way, and even once, he bit Hannibal when he was waking him up. He suspects Hannibal enjoyed being bitten far more than he is going to admit. 

“Are you worried that you might frighten Margot and Chiyoh?”

“No.”

In truth, he is just concerned that they might see him in his weakened state. While the moral war has been won- the one that raged inside him, where the warring factions were trying to decide if they should join Hannibal or kill him with his bare hands- the war on his psyche is on-going. Empathic disorders and all that they entail are not healed by love.  
Sure, Hannibal has been something of a salve for Will’s troubles, both real and invented by his fever-dreams. But the healing process is never so simple.

And it would be better for his dignity if Margot and Chiyoh did not know that. They don’t have to be tricked into believing that every one of his problems were washed away the moment he struck the water with Hannibal, but nor do they need to know how much he still struggles.

Hannibal must sense his concerns, because he offers a comfort, now “I would not worry yourself about their presence. I suspect it won’t remain in the house for very long. Chiyoh will remove herself from the situation as soon as she is well again.”

“Will you let her go?”

“She is not mine to control, Will, no matter what she may tell herself. She is an independent unit.”

“She thinks she’s a guard dog.”

“I would hope that time and distance have liberated her from that view. We shall have to see, won’t we?”

Will knows a conversation stopper when he hears one. So he falls silent, but only for a moment. With the sex out of the question, the snow has reminded Will of other, more innocent things. That in itself is quite remarkable, that the snow can relax him, when he thinks about how many crimes he has had to trudge through snow to investigate. 

Generally, Hannibal is reluctant to discuss where he has come from, but on nights such as these he can occasionally be persuaded to give something new up “Was there ever a summer where you grew up?”

“I assure you that the seasons are a familiar phenomena in Eastern-Europe.”

Will cracks a smile “That’s not what I meant. Did the snow ever melt completely?”

“Sometimes.”  
Tonight is not going to be one of those nights.

“My father used to borrow a cabin up in the north, if we had the time and the money in the winter. You know what happened to me the first time I saw snow?”

“You fell straight through the snow into a frozen lake.”

Will smiles. He must tell this story every time winter rolls around, forgetting it completely by the next year “Ten steps away from the car. My first ten steps in snow, and the eleventh one was through a patch of thin ice.”

When he says he fell in, he will always go onto explain, he doesn’t mean in the conventional sense of plunging straight through the water into the breath-takingly cold water, where he would be trapped, hammering at the ice until his oxygen had spiralled away in clouds of bubbles and there was nothing to do but wait until his eyes grew dark.  
No, in fact, when his younger self stepped onto that ice he did indeed step through it, but the hole he made did not spread and was only large enough to accommodate his leg in the first place. One slim, jeans-clad leg slipped into the cold, and it was like having the whole thing cut off.

His father made his way over carefully and, swearing explosively, grabbed him under the arms and lifted him out like a crane cranking a load of materials into the sky. Will remembers that he was more interested in investigating the liquid, that could so quickly envelop his flesh and restrict all feeling within it. He wanted to know what was underneath that ice, that made it so cold, and was in the process of trying to widen the hole so he could stick his head in after his foot when his father caught up to him.  
His father didn’t let him.

Even though Hannibal has heard this story probably a dozen times before (and indeed, Will can remember relating it on their first night in Russia- only that time it was post-coital and Hannibal was laughing harder than Will had ever seen him laugh, at the image of his husband as a child, trying to stick his head into a hole in the black lake surface, to his parent’s abject horror), he still laughs.  
And it is not a pity laugh either, or one because he is expected to laugh at the story he has heard so often.

“God, you look tired.” he notices how the shadows are hitting Hannibal, making him look ancient.

Well, weathered is probably a better word. Not aged, just ancient, like an art piece in a museum, freshly retrieved from the tomb of a long-dead monarch.

“I am,” he admits “Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

“One more week to the exhibition.”

“I was referring to our guests.”

For a moment, Will had forgotten about them entirely “Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I got that.”

Hannibal smirks slightly “I suppose it would be wise to retire for the night.”

Reluctantly, Will straightens up “Sure. I doubt we’ll get anyone else coming by, unless Freddie Lounds was hot on their trail.”

“If she is, we can let the dogs answer the door to her.”

The two men follow each other up to the bedroom.


	11. A storm arrives

The interviews start early the next day.

Jack has found that visiting people within the sanctuary of their own homes often makes for more relaxed interview-subjects. However, while this means that he doesn’t need to deal with nearly so much defensiveness and cursing, it does mean that they feel far more comfortable with lying, whether it is by omission or with big honking stinkers. When Jack knows someone is lying, he then has to call for a lie-detector and the entire process becomes much lengthier and complicated than he necessarily has the patience for.

They conduct the first interview of the day at eight in the morning.  
Jack has only managed to stay conscious with a cocktail of coffee, or what passes for coffee from the station vending machine, and determination not to be caught drooling at his desk. Winston, on the other hand, shares none of his concerns about appearances. The moment he settled himself underneath the desk at Jack’s feet, he dropped off.

The first witness they talk to is a college student. Twenty-something, studying criminal psychology (for which this back-water apparently has a brilliant course), living with a boyfriend whom Jack will be seeing separately at ten.  
Tyrone Collins. He found the first two victims, and if he had anything to do with their deaths, then he made a very convincing show of being horrified and physically revolted. According to the officers he called in- Johannsson was first on the scene, with her partner, a woman called Wallender-Kelly, and they were both eager to tell their side of the story- he stumbled away from the site of the crime as soon as the officers arrived and spent the next twenty minutes hyperventilating into a paper bag.

When the kid walks in, his brown face is completely drained of colour. Jack is tempted to offer him a paper-bag. Instead, he settles for jabbing Tahcawin in the side underneath the table. Her head snaps up, and she swipes at a small gloss of drool on her chin. 

“Sit down, Mr Collins.”

The kid sits, like he’s just been asked to sit down on a bed of nails.

“I’m Agent Crawford, and this is Agent Walker.” says Jack “And the dog is Winston.”

Tyrone glances underneath the table “Am I being searched for drugs?”

“No. He’s my dog.”

Going by the face he pulls, that creates more questions than it does answers. Jack doesn’t have the patience or the desire to explain, so he launches straight into the questioning.

Tyrone describes a compelling scene. Getting up, early in the morning, jogging the way he always does in the mornings. He told Santi (his boyfriend, short for Santiago, an engineering major who had sparked the interest of NASA with some kind of revolutionary theory about the nature of gravity) he would be back in an hour. He jogged. He passed into the woods that surround the town and occasionally meander into the township proper and, as he was stopped by a tree to catch his breath, he noticed that the slope off to his left was absolutely red with blood.

Frozen blood, as the bodies had been lying out in a winter night. At the bottom were a boy and a girl, both high-school aged, and both noted in their school community for good grades in sports and science respectively.  
As Tyrone explains what he saw, Jack reads along with the report in front of him. Not word-for-word retelling, but the important details are the same, and the kid seems to know not to stray too much from the main topic. His face grows more and more ashen and drawn as he is forced to recall the juiciest details of the case, which is always a good sign.

Too often, Jack finds, teenaged witnesses are jaded to what they have seen. They interact with violent videogames, gory movies on a daily basis and think themselves properly trained for the real-life experiences. It is always incredibly refreshing to find a young witness who has been ripped from their assumptions of the world, and the world’s essential good and safe qualities.

Once Tyrone is done, he leaves quickly. He sways slightly on his feet and must grab the back of his chair to prevent himself from falling.

“I don’t think he’s involved.” says Tahcawin, as the door shuts “He could barely talk about the murders.”

“Maybe not.”

“Sir…what reason, if I can ask, do we have to suspect him? He’s just a scared college kid.”

“I’m sure that is true.”

The second witness is a girl called Flora. From the way she dresses and carries herself, and the slight tint of guilt and fear on her features as her eyes slide over the agents, Jack would guess that she is doing something illegal. He doubts that she is in any way consciously involved in the murders- perhaps she is prostituting herself for some high-school boyfriend? Jack can’t count the number of times he has seen some version of a pretty young thing wrecking their lives for a cold and distant partner, who usually has about five or six other pretty young things losing their minds over them.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small notepad, balancing it on his knee and scribbling ‘Flora Vicario= prostitute?’

Tahcawin has the good sense not to glance into his lap while he does this. He will share his suspicions later.

“Ms Vicario. You found the second victims, correct?”

She nods “Um…why…why is there a dog in here?” 

“For all intents and purposes, Ms Vicario, there isn’t a dog in here. Don’t you worry about him. He’s not relevant to your questioning.”

At the last word, her face takes on the quality of someone who is about to be packed into a small, dark space with little hope of escape.  
Yep. Either she’s a prostitute, or working for a small-time drug baron. He doubts she is the pimp or the baron herself, from the way she is acting. Those types are often far more pleased with themselves and their perceived cleverness.

Flora Vicario describes a similar scene to that which Tyrone Collins was confronted by. She says that she was only walking near the scene, which strikes Jack as suspicious, considering that she was on the scene at five a.m. on a sub-zero winter night. He writes, next to his musings about the nature of her part-time job outside of high-school, that he should check the addresses of all of the houses on the street where she discovered the bodies. If he finds only one single, middle-aged business man with a repeat history of possessing illegal pornography or a restraining order taken out against him, then Jack will know he was right about Flora Vicario’s line of work.  
Kids these days. They get started earlier and earlier.

After Flora Vicario comes a kid named Samson Carter.

Samson Carter looks like the type of high-schooler that should be picked up by a talent scout for a sports scholarship. Very Nordic, with hair so blond it hurts to look at, and the kind of anaemic, fair skin that Jack understands has been brought into vogue by the trend of gothic romance novels sweeping the young-adult reading section. 

“I knew those guys. Dean and Mahiru…they were nice guys. I mean, we weren’t really friends, but you know. You know when people are nice and they don’t give other people that much trouble. They were like that. I guess they were just happy to be around each other.”

Jack notices him glancing underneath the table “Don’t mind the dog. He’s just hanging out.”

Samson shifts in his seat, obviously uncomfortable with the preceding. Apart from that one gesture, Jack hasn’t been able to pick up on any other emotional display. The boy is very good and guarding the way he feels, if he is in the business of feeling at all. He recalls a younger Hannibal Lecter, with far less charm, culture, wit, and all of that other stuff that made Hannibal recognisably Hannibal- the resemblance mainly stems from the calculated neutrality on his face.

Jack notes down Samson Carter’s name beside Flora Vicario’s and excuses the boy.

The next witnesses are a couple. A couple whose affection for each other is so strong, so obvious, that they bring a kind of aura into the room with them, not unlike the smell of cloying, rotting fruit. Jack resists the urge to cover his mouth and nose with his suit, and asks his questions.

Their names are Martha and John. They run the corner store on Station road, you know, the one next to that chic little café run by that Pakistani family? Yes, that’s us, so feel free to drop by if you have any questions, or if you need some groceries. Oh, and, Noor and her boys, they just do the best cup of tea in this town, you simply must try them when you have a spare moment.  
The bodies they found looked more like casserole than human beings, but the couple seems to have no trouble recounting what they have seen. Jack leafs through the background information towards the back of the file and finds, as he suspects, that both of them are ex-marine. He could smell the camouflage on them.

Once they leave, despite his best efforts, Jack kind of loses interest. The faces blur. The names turn into a series of jumbled, confused syllables that he knows he’s going to have to remember later on, and he shudders inwardly with the anticipation of the job ahead of him. Jack longs to swap positions with Winston, as his concentration and energy wanes.  
Let the nice small-town folk talk to the dog, and he can sleep underneath the desk and attract the curious stares.

On the other hand, Tahcawin is in her element. She is still young and relatively fresh out of the Academy, and yet, here she is. Able to conduct some serious detective work within the safety of a questioning room, for which there is at least one double-mirror (although Jack has no doubt that the officers behind it are either playing cards by now, or drooling into their doughnuts), and very little danger of being harmed.  
Here she is, at the centre of what promises to be one of the most major cases of the year- perhaps, the decade- and all she has to do is remember her training, for the moment.

God, does Jack wish he could remember what it felt like to be excited about his work again.

By the time that the Santiago kid shows up, Jack has resorted to pinching his own leg to keep his head from banging onto the table.  
But, at the sight of the college-aged kid coming in, clumsily stuffing an inhaler in his pocket with one hand and finger-combing long, floppy hair out of his face with the other, Jack takes an interest again. The last victim that has been found, so far- the child underneath the bridge. Santiago is, if he remembers correctly, the Sheriff’s grandson.

The Sherriff has the appearance of a good ol’ boy, straight out of the heartland of America, but his grandson is more of a city kid. Intelligent, and painfully aware of it- it embarrasses him, to be so much smarter than the rest of his family. Latino, so he must expect some foul, suspicious treatment  
on the basis of his skin colour.  
Jack notes a slight release of tension from the kid’s shoulders when he realises that both of the agents are, like him, some variety of brown.

“Uh,” says Santiago “You…you guys already saw my…Tyrone, right?”

“Your boyfriend?” suggests Tahcawin “Yes we did.”

Again, Santiago relaxes. What did Tyrone call him? Santi, that’s it.  
Santi must be in a tizzy with his nerves. Jack can imagine why- Latino, gay, and naturally sensitive to what other people think of him. The only thing that could make him more vulnerable to prejudice, and moreover, expecting of it, is if he were a practicing Muslim.

“So, Mr,” Jack glances at his file “Mr Valdez. You understand that you are in an unusual position here, right?”

Santi Valdez takes his seat and struggles to get comfortable on the stiff plastic “Because I found the only body that wasn’t part of a couple. The little kid.”

Jack nods “Did you know the child?”

“No. I mean, I saw him around. In shops and stuff. This is a small town, you know. But, no, I didn’t know him.”

“Can you tell us exactly how you found the body?” asks Tahcawin, even though she has a length description and several photos in a file open on her lap.

Santi struggles to make himself describe it. Frequently, he fidgets with his hands in some way. He’ll put them on the desk, folded, then put them in his lap to rest on either knee, then fold his arms across his chest and rock back into his chair, rigid and straight-backed. At least, Jack thinks, someone in this town isn’t completely jaded to the threat of death and the tragedy that their small town has been plunged head-first into.

Santi describes the child as being curled up on his side, arranged in what might have been the foetal position quite deliberately. Or it might have been a happy accident. All he knows is that he was walking underneath the bridge, taking the short-cut he normally takes to get back faster to the home he shares with Tyrone Collins, when he is returning from the university. The body waited for him there.

As soon as he saw the body, he judged that the person was dead. The dusting of frost on top of his body made it clear, as did the red colouring of blood around the boy’s mouth, the red fingers of frost and ice extending a slight distance in every direction around his body  
Santi lost no time in calling his grandfather’s office, once he was finished voiding his stomach of his lunch.

“And I don’t know what else would be helpful to hear.” he finishes.

By now, his hands are deep in his pockets.  
Years of experience has taught Jack to separate out a nervous personality from a nervous killer, doing his best not to reveal something crucial about his crimes. Santi is definitely not a killer of any kind. A fidgeting, jumping rabbit of a kid, yes, but he’s no murderer. Jack expects that the kid might be somewhere on the spectrum. The way the kid is so viscerally uncomfortable with the attention being focussed on him and his story reminds Jack painfully of another perpetually unsettled young man that he used to know.

“That should be it, Mr Valdez.”

“How are you, by the way?” asks Tahcawin “I understand you were in the hospital last night for an asthma attack?”

Jack doesn’t think the question is appropriate. The size and functionality of this boy’s alveoli are none of their business, after all, and Santi blinks with shock and a growing, swelling discomfort as he realises for what must be the fiftieth time in his career of asthma attacks that the station and his grandfather’s colleagues know all about his asthma.  
Jack wasn’t around to see the fallout of the telephone call, being that he was hijacked immediately afterwards by his new host, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the entire station is equipped with up-to-the-minute information. He is sure he heard at least one pair of officers discussing it in the halls as they left.

“Um, yeah. I…it gets worse with stress, my asthma. And I did kind of find a dead boy…so, yeah, no, it wasn’t really…my finest moment. Can I go now?”

Once he has been given permission to go, Santi moves with the startling grace Jack has come to expect from interviewees leaving an interrogation. When they are certain that they’re not about to be beaten and water-boarded, and that whatever lies they have mixed in with the truth are going to hold firm, the relief is palpable and gives them wings. Jack is consistently surprised with his most high-strung witnesses that they don’t sprout said wings and burst through the ceiling the moment they are done.  
He would like to see something like that, at least once, before he manages to retire completely. 

Then again, he is sure to have plenty of time to see something like that since the only way he’ll be able to remove himself completely from Purnell’s clutches would be to move countries, fake his own death, remove a vital organ or a limb, or all of the above in a reverse order.

A short time after Santi has left, Johansson pokes her blonde head around the door. Her face is cheery, despite the deep bags under them and the bad news she has to bring.

“I’m afraid that the next witness is detained, sir. It’s our butcher. She’s stuck in traffic. One of those giant trucks was driving along the interstate and dropped their load, which turned out to be live chickens. Factory bred- it’s horrible what they do in those places. Anyway, you can imagine that the first glimpse of life and light that these hens are getting, well, they want to extend it, don’t they-”

Jack rubs his temples, and interrupts “Officer, are you telling me that the next few witnesses will be detained because a there’s a truckload of chickens loose and disrupting traffic conditions?”

She grins “Pretty fun sir. I thought this kind of thing only happens in the comics. I understand that it looks like a twister of feathers, down and bird-shit out there, sir. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” says Tahcawin “Isn’t there an officer on our list of interviews today?”

Something dark and sad flickers across Johansson’s face “Yes there is.”

“Can you bring him here ahead of schedule? There’s no sense in us wasting the interrogation room as long as we’ve got it.”

A brief internal struggle flashes across Johanson’s face. Should she, shouldn’t she? Is this a good time for her colleague- does he want to help the case concerning his missing, presumed dead, step-daughter? Or does he want to just lose himself in his work and only surface when they have something solid, so he is no longer tormented by fever dreams of what is being done to his little girl?

“I’ll go get him.”

 

A little ways across town, Will Graham and Margot Verger-Bloom are having a difficult time in the traffic conditions as well.

Margot has a headache, which does not make matters any better. It is not quite a migraine, but it is no ordinary headache.  
Her face is grey and her jaw is tight and gritted. She sits with her head cast back, almost boneless, as if someone had taken all the tension from her neck. But from the neck down, her nerves are strained, the tendons, visible under the skin, as if the strings of an instrument waiting to be plucked. 

Now that they are caught in traffic, Margot has grown steadily more and more frantic to finish their supplies run. She needs painkillers as well, and Hannibal only keeps a garden variety of morphine in the house, which, no, she cannot take.

A), because who takes something as strong as morphine so casually to alleviate a headache, and what kind of person do you have to be to be taking morphine outside a hospital in the first place? Next, she wanted to know why Hannibal even had surgery-strength morphine sitting in his cupboard next to cough syrup. Then she decided she didn’t want to know.

B) because she has had some bad reactions to morphine in the past, and the last thing, she tells them, that you want right now is my bloated body prone on your living room floor. Now get the hell in the car Will, before my head explodes.

“Does this kind of thing happen a lot?” she asks through gritted teeth “Chickens on the road, I mean. It’s kind of charming in a provincial, sit-com way.”

“No,” says Will curtly “It does not.”

He has found himself gradually growing defensive of his small town, in the way that lifers and long-timers tend to be when there are accusations of back-water behaviour and a general hick quality of education and life. In spite of his scathing scepticism, regarding any kind of community that claims to be close-knit and kind to each other on the basis of a small population and a close proximity, Will has been unable to stop himself from growing fond of the little hick-back-water-berg that has accepted (absorbed and assimilated) him and his husband.  
And he does not appreciate whatever assumption it is that Margot is making about the wider community.

Just because there happens to be a storm of factory-bred chickens, stretching their flabby, weak wings for the first time and a torrent of shed feathers all over their roads does not mean that this kind of thing happens a lot.  
Usually, it’s just a cow that has wandered onto the road from one of the neighbouring farms, and paused to chew its cud in the middle of what should be a busy intersection, but which must be stopped, to choke traffic up for miles, until someone with a calm enough demeanour so as not to spook the cow can usher it off the road.

He is not, however, going to inform Margot of this.

“Margot, we need to talk.”

She gives him a stern look “I know we do, but this isn’t a discussion I want to have until my entire head is numb.”

A chicken flapping at a high velocity smacks into the ceiling, making them both jump. Said chicken slides down the glass. One beady, milky eye is trained on Will as it slips down the windshield, then tumbles off the side of the bonnet.

Will locks the doors and makes sure that none of the windows are so much as cracked open.

“I need to know what kind of…” he trails off, uncertain of how to continue without offending her, as he so often is with people as confident and assured of themselves as Margot is “Trouble. The trouble that you’re bringing into my household.”

“Speaking of trouble,” she inspects the back of her beaten, torn hand “This new, open relationship you and Hannibal seem to be settled in is charming and heart-warming and everything, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave him and his old conspirator alone together. That woman is obsessed with him, you know. Not romantically. Don’t worry, Will, you got the ring anyway.”

He doesn’t so much as crack a smile. Whatever vestigial, vague affection he could summon up for her and their brief relationship (and when he thinks back, he dodges carefully around the subject of the baby- his and hers- that died inside the sow) is quickly melting away. Margot has grown more acerbic since he last saw her, four years ago.

Well, that is understandable, seeing as her family has apparently been filched from underneath her nose. And God only knows how long she has been dragging herself over field and glen and high-way, with a near-stranger who apparently refused to even give her a name (“I mostly just called her ‘hey you’,” admitted Margot as she towelled off on the previous night), although she is the only clear way Margot has to the men who are somehow going to help her retrieve her family.

Will is still confused as to how Margot thinks that he and his husband are going to be helpful in her quest to get back Alana and that still nameless son (something classical, like Joshua or Thomas), and he would prefer to stay confused. It would suit him just fine if Margot and Chiyoh get up and leave tonight, deciding they don’t want their help after all.  
However, it would seem that he is in for the long haul. She is buying feminine hygiene products for Chiyoh, after all (though Will didn’t have the gall to ask if Chiyoh needed them immediately, or if Margot was just preparing the house for female occupation in general). Soon there will be the smell of female shampoo in the shower and an entirely alien, somewhat confronting set of underwear mixing in with the boxer shorts that he’s used to putting through the washing machine.

Will doesn’t necessarily mind sharing his house with two women. He has had female room-mates before. One was the exact, card-board cut out of an angry feminist, right down to the shaved head and the copious use of the word ‘vagina’ to make him uncomfortable. Another was a perfectly normal, functioning human being, except for her unfortunate and oddly male habit of leaving clothes  
strewn on almost every available surface in her room. 

Will is not worried about finding bras on the banister, or tripping over dresses and Gucci shoes (though he’d be surprised if either of the women have carried, worn, or considered buying Gucci-anything at any point in their lives). Or even being told that the reason he was able to get the oven fixed without outside help is because certain kinds of technology will only respond to those equipped with a penis.

His concerns about the impending female invasion boil down to this; it’s his house, goddammit. His marriage. His new life, and these are two unwelcome spectres that he had no idea he was going to be hosting, and still has no idea why he is hosting.

The sullen silence that has built in the car is made all the more noticeable by the cacophony of alarmed squawks and screams from the pedestrians who have walked into the confusion.  
Outside, the chaos shows no sign of slowing. A light flurry of snow has begun to fall, adding a magical effect to the absurdity of the frantic chickens. With traffic backed up for a few miles in each direction, Will doubts they’re going to be able to move out of the chicken-storm for at least another half hour.

Margot must be having the same thoughts, because she lays her seat back, flattening herself in the now horizontal seat.

“I’ll tell you, but don’t ask too many questions. Just listen to me. Just let me tell you what happened to us, and then you can work your profiler’s magic.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to interpret the chapter title as either a reference to the literal storm of chickens, or to the arrival of everyone's favourite marksman and Muskrat lady


	12. An account of the abduction of the Verger-Blooms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now I'm not sure if there's some canonical name to Alana and Margot's little bundle of stolen-sperm-baby-joy, so I decided I'd name him after a painter.  
> A classical painter, a guy who was famous for his triptychs and most famous for painting that 'Garden of Earthly delights' painting that you can't help but regard with a fascinated horror as you take a mental tally of the number of revellers being sodomized (cheerfully sodomized, mind you) by flowers. Which, of course, is a charming mental image to have in your head when being introduced to a new character

The child’s name is Hieronymus.

At first, Alana argued this. She pointed out how the suggested name started with the same letter as the name of a certain, proficient and determined (and most certainly not dead) serial killer they had only just begun hiding from when the newest Verger struggled into the world. Margot disputed her wife’s fears, pointing out how many H-words and H-names there were across the Romantic languages.  
They can’t live in fear of H-words and H-names for the rest of their lives. And besides, Margot will be damned if she’s giving her son a name as common as Tom or George, or whatever it is that affluent women- American nobility- are expected to saddle their children with.

So Hieronymus it was.

His pregnancy was not an easy one. Alana’s body had only recently recovered from a series of traumatic injuries. Physical, mental, some mental that could create physical injuries if the weather conditions were right, and some physical that exacerbated the mental issues already in place. It was, of course, out of the question to use a surrogate, and with Margot’s uterus long-gone and long-rotted somewhere in a biohazard disposal site, they essentially had no choice.  
Alana’s body knew that it was only freshly healthy, and protested at the new life that had taken up residence inside it and the risk it could pose to Alana’s own wellbeing. 

The first few months were a struggle just to keep the ball of cells that was to grow into Hieronymus inside her. The last few days were a struggle to get him out, and when he did come out, he was determined to bring some of his home with him. Margot had not been aware that it was medically possible for a baby to be born with a fistful of flesh scraped from the birth canal in one fist, but that’s how her son popped out.  
Blue-faced, over-large, covered in one of his mothers’ blood and clutching a bit of her insides.

They loved him immediately.

Hieronymus was coming up on three years old when they left their first home. On the day he was abducted, he was settled comfortably into his seventh year and looking forward to the eighth with great anticipation and excitement.  
They had told him that he was going to get his first horse at eight. Any younger, and Margot insisted his soft brain would be bounced around too much in his skull and turn to mush, and Alana was concerned for years that they might have a repeat of that death scene in ‘Gone with the wind’ if they let a rambunctious child on any large animals.

On the day that he was abducted, Margot felt no premonition of the impending tragedy. She woke before Alana, as usual, and watched from the safety and warmth of their blankets as the morning light crawled from between the curtains and across the wall of their bedroom.  
The house was not small, but nor was it of the grand and inconvenient scale of the houses that Margot had grown up in, and Alana had grown up hearing about in fairy-tales read to her by her father before bed.

Theirs was a modest estate, and at the centre, a modest house with little in the way of ostentatious architecture or art inside. When they were picking from the places that were available in the vast areas surrounding the French Alps, Margot threatened to commit arson if Alana tried to move her into a house with wall scones.  
She was finished with wall scones, she said, and those stupid tasteful vases with the spotlights underneath them. From now on, I want vapid, mediocre impressionist art on the walls and splintering shelves. And every piece of wall that isn’t covered in that will be covered by bookshelves or family pictures. No vases, Alana, I mean it. I’ll use any vase you bring over this threshold for shooting practice.

Alana conceded that there would not be any vases, nor wall scones to place them inside, in their household.

Once the light had reached such an angle that Margot could no longer doze away her morning guilt-free, she threw on one of the kimonos they use for bath-robes and padded downstairs in thin slippers to see what her son was up to.  
The TV was tuned into some YouTube channel, all of it in French. Hieronymus lay on his belly with a puddle of crayons and crayon-marked paper around him. His laugh was distinctly French, and Margot noticed it especially that day. The accent on his English had just the slightest American tint to it, thanks to his mothers, but his laugh was completely French in both accent and cadence.

He spoke to her in English. Margot’s French is excellent, Alana’s passable, and they always spoke to each other in English.

“Mama, look. He can’t stand on the ice.”

Her son gestured to the bear that was slathered across the wide-screen. A grizzly bear, making a spectacle of itself and a mockery of the ferocity of nature by slipping this way and that on a patch of black-ice, usually ass-first into a snow-drift on the side. Margot grinned. She didn’t like that her son was choosing to watch animals discovering the tyranny of a frictionless surface, instead of say, reading a good book, but at least he was drawing.  
And the bear was kind of hysterical.

All the same, she switched the TV to the early edition of the news, ignoring his protestations that he wanted to see the polar bear slipping on ice.  
She beckoned him onto her lap, and he came bearing a sheaf of drawings for her to look over.

“If you want to see polar bears being dumb, then you’ll see it in the wild,” she said into his hair “We’ll go up to Sweden and watch some of them try to defeat nature in nature. How does that sound?”

Hieronymus can tell the promise is rash, but he’s still excited. Winter break has only just begun. Margot has earned the position of being the fun mom, because she is the one who whisks the family away on last-minute jaunts to the Nordic countries to see the tundras, or to Britain to sip tea and see the sprawl of the farms and the sheep in the countryside. Alana is the one who makes him clean his room, which is a long-standing point of contention between them.

Hieronymus doesn’t see the point of having to clean his own living-space when he has a couple of servants (a small, but loyal staff, who are completely ignorant of the danger that the Verger-Blooms pose to them and their own families, should their old enemies once again taken an interest in them) to do that for him.  
Alana tells him that dependence on other people is not the way that a person who is physically and mentally capable of taking care of themselves should behave. Hieronymus points out that he’s a child, so not technically capable of doing either, which is why he has moms. Alana tells him to take out his trash or she’s going to take away his laptop.

Alana generally wins. 

“Mama, if we go to Sweden, can we see John?” he asked his eyes bright with excitement “And maybe, since it’s not that far, can we go to Lapland to see Ava?”

One of the problems of having a child raised in a wealthy European household is that he has friends in nearly every country, every province, so wherever they stop, there’s some kind of play-date to organise. A guided tour in the Coliseum after hours, so Hieronymus can explore with the son of a prominent Italian banker, while his mothers and said banker talk about the Greek crisis and trail behind.  
Cutting him loose in the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay, also afterhours, with a French girl called Clemence-Camille, whose father has been on the board of almost every historic art museum in his country of origin (which is not France) and a few more besides in other countries. There was one especially memorable experience in a massive estate in Poland, where Hieronymus got to play with a tame bear cub and the little Polish noble-boy that owned it, like an American child owns a dog. The leash and everything. Margot remembers herself as far more animalistic that day than the bear ever was, in her anxiousness to keep her baby from being clawed by a rambunctious bear.

Folding an arm around Hieronymus’s chubby baby-boy belly, she pulled him onto her knee and bounced him as they reviewed the drawings together, and talked about what they would do in Sweden. Alana stumbled down a few minutes later in another kimono, and began to help the bustling Spanish man in their kitchen, employed as their chef and occasional baby-sitter, if the usual girl in the nearby town has some previous engagement when Alana and Margot want a date-night.

Eventually, she wandered over with two cups of Guillermo’s famous hot chocolate and passed one of the steaming cups to her son, who wrapped his hands in his shirt before he accepted it, so as not to scorch his stubby digits. Even as he grew older and his weight redistributed itself, his fingers remained as fat as sausage links. Margot appreciated their plumpness when they combed through her hair and held her own, longer, thinner fingers tightly on the streets.  
He had Alana’s dark hair, her own grey eyes, and some oddly olive skin that must be from a long-buried Latino or Native American ancestor in Alana’s family tree. 

“What have you drawn?” asked Alana, taking one of the most decorated papers.

Margot pointed, her fingers greasy with a fine layer of crayon wax “That’s you, that’s Hero, and that charming blob right there is me.”

Alana’s eyebrows shot up in a mixture of shock and amusement “Hero, why did you draw Mama so big?”

Hieronymus giggled, his eyes impish “Because Mama is big.”

“I am not,” countered Margot, clapping a hand over one of her rolls underneath the kimono. She had not put on that much weight in recent years- the stress of raising a child in hiding from a serial killer, combined with their lavish, if a little low-key lifestyle does not make for a couple of years when one keeps weight on easily.  
It could have been that it was her son’s way of encouraging her to eat a little more. Since watching an eel swim into her bastard brother’s mouth, however, she found it difficult to sustain an appetite. Many things have stuck with her, from the slaughter at Muskrat farm, and for some reason, she remembers the eel more than she remembers a meat-dummy being lowered into a bunch of feral pigs while her own screams played and echoed throughout Mason’s private slaughterhouse.

“You will be,” insisted Hieronymus “If you keep eating all those pastries.”

Margot grinned- more at the fact that he just used a word like ‘pastry’ in the correct context, rather than out of shame at being caught on the late-night fridge raids she sometimes conducts if she had an especially light eating day “You shouldn’t be up to see that kind of thing. You’re staying up way past your bed time, aren’t you?”

“Uh, no,” her son stared guiltily at the floor “No, I’m not.”

They both laughed.

The day would have likely passed at the same pleasant, easy pace. Alana was off from her work at the local police station, where she doubled as a beat officer and an occasional behavioural consultant, on the rare occasions that one was needed. It was by no means a glamorous job when compared to what she had done previously, but it kept her close to home, and it was a way of being directly connected to the crimes that went on in their town. Just in case a stranger showed up, causing problems, raising eyebrows. Alana would know about it early.

Margot, on the other hand, had some work to be done. She was, after all, the head of an internationally wealthy, influential family, and there is never a day off from that particular role. But the work was light, given the holiday season. All she had to do was a few skype calls with business associates in the Middle East, where Christmas was not a major holiday, and to finish hammering out a few details with a company in China where one of their factories was about to go up. All of that could be pushed towards the end of the day.

They dressed in warm clothes, with the intention to go gallivanting around in the snow. It was a blanket of white, fringed by brilliant ever-greens and the sight of the Alps sprawling out in front of their house. Days like that do not go ignored by small boys, who have grown bored of their screens and electronics.  
And of course, it was outside where Hieronymus and Alana were abducted.

It should not have happened. The estate may have been of a modest size, but the security staff was not. It was far more suited to the kinds of gigantic grounds that Margot was accustomed to. Due to her childhood in these places, she had grown to feel that the only way they were going to absolutely ensure their safety was by acting like they lived in a castle and getting the best security money could buy.  
Some of the men and women, she already knew from some of the work they had done on the Verger estate. There were a couple of times when radical animal rights activists had made threats on Mason’s life and extra security was added, for safety’s sake. Margot often thinks how she would have gladly held her brother down while the angry activists gutted him like a pig so he understood the pain, or helped them to put a bolt in his head the way cows are killed on a factory line in a slaughter house.

The security perimeter was marked out by a barbed wire fence, which had thick metal gates that needed a code to be punched into a keypad to be opened, when someone wanted to access the woods. There was a small phone in the guard-box which could be used by the guards to alert the family on the odd occasion that some kind of suspicious figure did turn up, in case it was necessary to stuff Hieronymus in the panic room and for Margot and Alana to choose the largest and most intimidating weapons from their small, highly-illegal arsenal in case they ended up needing to defend themselves.

To gain access to the compound, someone would have had to kill the entirety of the estate’s defence force. Now, to do this, the perpetrator would have had to be quite powerful and quite determined, yet Margot never got the chance to confirm for herself exactly what had happened. The direction in which the security gate was, and where the majority of the staff were concentrated, was impossible to go to, once the estate started to fill up with the aggressors.

All she knows is that her estate came under attack and was quickly and easily overwhelmed. 

The first of the abductors stalked out of the tree-line as Hieronymus was elbow-deep in a snow-drift, attempting to make what he assured his mothers was going to be the biggest snowball in the world. Alana and Margot were busy inspecting another of the snowmen they had already completed for signs of animal interference. Once, they had caught a deer, somehow strayed past the fence (via a hole that sent Margot into a small panic when she thought about what kind of other beast might have sneaked inside) chewing on the carrot that served as a nose for one of their snow army.

Like all parents, Margot and Alana were both equipped with a heightened sense for when they are being observed. Those who has born children or are in the process of raising them are often afflicted with something like the disorder of social anxiety, where they are always sure of being watched by threatening eyes and malcontents, however, the harm they are eager to cause is all directed on the soft head of their child.  
Margot felt her first prickling sensation- the sensation of ‘someone has their eyes on my son and I’m going to put them out if they come any closer’- when Hieronymus was already too far away to be reached by her before the kidnapper got there.

She looked up before Hieronymus did.  
The moment was somewhere between terrifying and too surreal to be properly registered. A plague doctor advanced on her son, wearing the full, corpse-white mask with gilt along the edges and sheer black holes over the eyes. The clothes were a much more modern; body-armour and combat boots, all of it black. Were it not for the body armour, Margot might have wasted another precious moment trying to figure out if the stranger were a time-traveller.

She shouted to her son.

Just as he looked up and Alana started after him, the person in the mask lunged and scooped him up around the waist. Hieronymus let out a scream, but his face was confused rather than terrified.  
Margot has since clung onto that simple fact: he was confused when he was taken, and he is still young enough to misunderstand his situation and remain confused. If Alana and Hieronymus are still together, then Alana should find it a manageable task to shield from him the truth of their situation  
He’s still so gullible and innocent, at his age.  
None of that razor-sharp cynicism that has helped Margot to survive her family, when they were still alive, to be survived. Not yet, anyway.

Margot screamed to Hieronymus, telling him to bite the person’s hand. He didn’t. And it would not have mattered at any rate, since their hand was swathed in a thick glove and a bite would not have made so much as a dent in the fabric, let alone the skin beneath. Alana was struggling out of her coat as she ran.

Perhaps it was because Hieronymus’s kidnapper was over-confident, or surprised by the look of absolute maternal fury on Alana’s face, but they did not run so Alana could not reach them. She whipped her coat over their head and it had the odd effect of a bird being covered up by a cloth, thanks to the long jut of the plague doctor mask underneath the fabric. 

While they struggled to keep their balance against the sudden darkness and a kicking child, Alana tackled them around the waist. Margot found that she was more horrified to see Hieronymus pitched into the snow than she had to see him attacked. That got her running faster towards her family- she needed to check for scraped knees and bruises.

Delivering a vicious kick to the groin area (always a good place to shoot for when you’re short on time in an escape; women are not fond of being kicked in the ovaries, in the same way that men will crumple when kicked in the testicles), Alana plucked Hieronymus from the snow and started back to Margot. For a moment, it seemed as if they would meet in the middle.  
Then the guns started to go off.

The first report rang out from near the security gate. As she had been hoping for their staff to start to respond, Margot was at first relieved to hear the shot. Then another and another rang out, all within mere seconds of each other, and she realised that they owned no gun that made such a noise. Whoever was shooting was doing so with a model that none of the staff carried, openly, at least, and that was enough to make her realise that their safe house had finally been breached.

Even so, at the back of her mind, she was comforted by the thought that it was not Hannibal, or Will. Neither of them could ever be so crass and forward as to barge into the complex with guns blazing, like something out of a stock action movie.  
Another figure appeared on the crest of the white slope, from the direction of the security perimeter. The strange choice of body armour and plague-doctor masks seemed to have been a uniform, because they were wearing it too. Their companion sprung up, ripping their way out of Alana’s winter coat. Evidently, either the blow had not been sufficient to hurt even through the body armour, or the person underneath was a woman with a high tolerance for pain.

Alana was shot in the shoulder.  
She did not fall forward, nor did the bullet graze Hieronymus, although he was spattered in his mother’s blood. Looking back, Margot realises the adrenaline bath in Alana’s veins must have prevented her from feeling the pain of the force, even though it threw her forward just a little and smoke issued steadily from the wound along with a gout of blood.  
Again, Margot screamed.

Now that she has had the time and the distance to think about that day, pretty much all she did was scream. Is it because it has been so many years since she was in a fight for her life that she was so ineffective- so flabby and out of practice in the survival situation on their estate? Was it the sense of security that the years of relative, undisturbed safety had lulled her into?

Probably. She takes a small aside, to step out of character and inform Will that she has had the chance to be more brutal and vicious on the run than she ever as before. Even under the Verger roof.

“Do you know how cold it can get in Alaska in the dead of winter?” she tugs her coat around her, as if to ward off a chill “And it’s always dark. Darker than you would think is possible. I shot a horse in the head, while we were chasing down a lead there. Then I cut open its belly and crawled inside. I spent a whole night in cooling horse innards, and the only reason I survived that night is because I saw Han Solo doing the same thing with some alien. In the past, I haven’t even liked using a riding crop on horses.”

She swallows with some difficulty and thumps herself in the stomach. Her eyes roll up to the ceiling, under a fine mist of tears.

Alana may not have really felt the shot, but she was losing blood quickly. Flagging, in spite of the panic and adrenaline driving her forward.  
She knew this and she put Hieronymus in the snow, pushing him towards Margot.

“Run,” she ordered “I’m right behind you.”

Goddamn her, Margot listened. She reached for their son and held him close and ran, shielding him with her body in case of more bullets. Alana let out of a sharp cry of pain, but it was thankfully not from another shot. The first wound must have been making itself known.

Hieronymus sobbed. If he was able to speak through his tears, he most certainly would have demanded to know what was going on. Who these people were. Why they were wearing masks.  
If Momma was gonna be ok.

Margot made a bee-line for the house. The door was thrown open, and Guillermo appeared with a rifle in one hand and a ladle in the other, which he must have forgotten to drop in the confusion. He took aim with only one hand and shot expertly over their heads. Aiming for the heads, of course, since the body armour made all other shots useless to target.  
He let Margot duck through the door, then offered his hand to Alana in support, slamming the door after them.

“Plague doctors?” he cried, incredulous “I thought you said they were classy, not cheesy!”

Margot shook her head “That is not Hannibal or Will! I don’t know who those people are!”

Guillermo bit his lip “Bad news from the gate. I can’t get anyone on the phone. I think they’re-,” he broke off, looking at Hieronymus. His instincts as a nanny were far stronger than his instincts as a body-guard “Hey, it’s ok, Hero. You’re alright now.”

As if to disagree with him, a bullet erupted through the door and embedded itself in the wall, sending up a spray of splinters. 

Guillermo wasted no time. He grabbed Alana, as if he were a newly-wed carrying his bride over the threshold, and rushed towards the panic room. Margot was far ahead of him, so she was the first to be shot at again.  
The back door was gaping open, she thinks, because she was aware of a sharp, cold breeze blowing through the house as a third of the plague doctors reared up from the kitchen and aimed a gun at her. She could have easily been shot in the head. There was a second’s hesitation, where the doctor seemed to be deciding whether or not they should do just that.

This gave Guillermo just enough time to ready the rifle again and fire. He caught the doctor in the side, and the force knocked them down. This time, the mask was knocked askew. Margot didn’t wait to see what was going to happen. She had their son to protect, after all. She cradled his head into her chest and ran to the living room, where the panic room could be accessed. No sooner than she had crossed the threshold did a window break, and another of the doctors climbed in through the jagged window frame.

Margot put Hieronymus down and pushed him underneath the couch, then grabbed a fire-poker from the hearth and swung it in front of her, daring the intruder to come and get her.

“This doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it.” said the plague doctor reasonably.

Margot can still hear his voice when there are no other sounds to distract her, and nothing to think about apart from what might be happening to her son and her wife at that very moment.

“What the hell do you want?” she barked “Is it money? Is it us?”

“We’re here to take you alive, but we are allowed to injure you if we need to do so.” said the doctor, advancing with a handgun drawn.

She was aware of how the odds were stacked against her. Intruders, killed her staff, breaking into her house- it was all over anyway, they would never be able to stay in France after this. What could she do against who knows how many of these heavily armed, well-protected lunatics?  
They wanted her alive, but injured. So, not much for hospitality, but they did not want to murder her either. At least, not by their own hands.

“Who is it that you work for?” she made a show of lowering her poker “Tell me that much, and I’ll come quietly.”

In the hall, she could hear Guillermo and Alana struggling, perhaps with the doctor that Guillermo had knocked to the floor.

“You will see.”

The doctor stepped forward, the gun still trained on her. Margot thought through her options. It would be best if she could keep her family together. If they were together, then they would weasel out of the situation together, safely, and intact. 

She would have made this choice if Hieronymus had not acted.

From underneath the couch, he lashed out with a pair of sharp scissors he must have been using in his arts and crafts session. Half of Margot was cheering him on as he found the tiny chink in the armour, between the boot and the leg-guard and drove it home, and half of her was scolding herself, wondering how he managed to get his hands on those and why he was looking for them anyway when he had safety scissors.

The doctor let out a roar of pain and shock. Hieronymus drove the scissors, then retreated under the couch, leaving them to stick out of the doctor’s flesh. Margot saw her chance and took it. She swung the poker into the doctor’s head with such force that it was bent when she drew it back. The mask was knocked away, and she saw a bloodied man with the kind of scars that a mercenary collects.  
This encouraged her.

It was only a mercenary, after all, and she had dealt with those before at the Verger residence

Margot hit him again. Teeth and blood sprayed from his mouth, and the side of his head crumpled under a balaclava. She hit him again. He fell to the floor heavily and lay, splayed out and dazed, his head lolling from side to side. Peeling back the collar about his throat, Margot grabbed the scissors from his leg and drove the red blades deep into the man’s Adam’s apple

Hieronymus screamed.

“Don’t look, honey!” she said to him, as a geyser of blood hit her at a great velocity “It’s alright!”

Alana stumbled into the room, leaning heavily on the wall for support “Margot!”

She was crouched over the bleeding man and smothering his nose and mouth in her coat to make his death a little faster “Get Hero!”

Alana somehow knew to reach under the couch. She bent painfully and opened her arms, and Hieronymus clung to her, sobbing again.

“Momma!” he cried “What’s happening?”

Guillermo appeared in the door with a gun, which he tossed to Margot “Here!”

She caught it. A hunting rifle. She’d used it several times before on the estate to scare off wolves with a shot to the air, and many times before on the Verger estate.  
Margot may not be an excellent shooter, but now, she could see that she had an excess of targets. They were all over the slope. All over the place, each one of them carrying a gun larger and stronger than hers, and each one of them packed into armour. The chances of taking another down with Hieronymus’s crafts scissors were little to none.

Her mind worked a mile a minute. She retreated to her injured wife’s side and grasped her arm. Alana looked at her. Hieronymus grasped Margot’s free hand and sniffed.

“We’re going to get out of this,” she said firmly “I promise.”

 

“But we didn’t,” says Margot, gesturing to herself “As you can see, it’s just me imposing on your hospitality.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to offer my apologies to all of the Toms and Georges of the readership. Your names are charming, and Margot's expressed views do not in any way replicate that of the company (the author)


	13. You don’t have that many contacts in the fine art world anymore. Not after you and Dumas had that punch-out in the gallery in New York.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enter Freddie Lounds  
> For those of you who are going to be going 'WHAAAT' when you see the name of her man, it is pronounced like 'fairy' and 'dune', and is a name of Iranian origin.

“Well if it’s such a secret…secret secret, then how the heck did you find out about it? You don’t have that many contacts in the fine art world anymore. Not after you and Dumas had that punch-out in the gallery in New York.”

Freddie Lounds is content to let her boyfriend trail behind her without answering a single one of his questions. The way he talks, there is no invitation for response anyway. The words spill out of his mouth in a way that would mean a flash-flood, if the words had been water.  
While he talks aloud to himself, trying to figure out how Freddie has discovered yet another artistic tryst, Freddie works one-handed. She has not had time to put on her prosthetic yet, and she made it very clear in the early stages of their relationship that she would dump her boyfriend the moment he tried to take pity on her disability.

His name is Fereydoon Malcolm. He is four months younger than her exactly, and wears a permanent expression of mild surprise, as if he has just stepped on gum or been slapped in the face by a wet leaf. Freddie met him a few years earlier at an activist’s protest against practices at Guantanamo Bay, where he was waiting for his little sisters to be done waving their signs and shouting their slogans.  
Freddie wanted to interview him as to his opinions on the treatment of the people in Gitmo- possibly some of his own nation of origin.

Fereydoon had looked at her in his trademark, slight confusion and said “How many people from Jersey do they have in Gitmo?”

She remembered him after the rally for being the only one to make her laugh that week. Their next encounter was also a chance, and also happened to involve his little sisters again. He was waiting outside a dressing room while two voices chatted in Farsi in the cubicle, presumably about waist sizes and which neckline would flatter their small chests the most. Freddie approached him under her own steam, taking care to conceal the Victoria’s Secret bag behind herself (it was nothing exciting, just some new socks and a sensible sports bra, but she wasn’t about to explain that to him).

They struck up a conversation. Freddie cannot remember to this day what they talked about, but given what she and Fereydoon discuss these days, she thinks it might have had to do with either books, music or Transformers.

After the little sisters, Sharlotte and Minou, had bought a variety of dresses with hemlines which their father was not going to be thrilled by, Freddie ended up sharing a salad with Fereydoon in the food court. Like something out of a bad romance novel, when Freddie got home and searched for the new socks to see how they felt on her new wooden floors, she discovered a clutch of tiny-waisted dresses in her bag.

Fereydoon called her about ten minutes later, and said “Please tell me you have their dresses. They won’t stop crying.”

Their first date was at a small, out of the way jazz club where Freddie often went to wind down after finishing a high-pressure article. The moment Fereydoon asked the waiter if they had fruit juice as an alternative to beer (and went as far to pull the waiter aside to explain that it wasn't because he was a practising Muslim that he had to avoid alcohol, but also because hops made him gassy and he wasn't about to blow this date- all within ear-shot) Freddie knew she had found a keeper. They took their time getting to know each other. Freddie did not have any family still living to disapprove of her dating a Muslim man, though if her sainted father had still been sucking air, then he would have done so fiercely. Fereydoon's family were only glad that their son was finally bringing home a woman, non-Muslim though she may be. She had the heartiest welcome into a household that she had ever had since staring her work as a tabloid journalist and was told, ten minutes after meeting her, in great confidence, by Fereydoon's mother Zaenab that Freddie had just won her a bet. Apparently, Fereydoon's parents had been betting a coke on whether or not their son was gay since he failed to get a date for his junior prom and went with a good book instead. Now, Zaenab was one coke richer and delighted to have a daughter-in-law to teach the ways of her kitchen and complain about her family to. They moved in together almost three years ago. Since then, Freddie has given up tabloid journalism for professional writing and hit the best-seller’s list only once, but that was with her first novel, so she has her hopes for the future. Whenever the anniversary of the murder husband’s purported death rolls around, Freddie makes a series of TV appearances and submits sufficiently alarmist articles to the write news outlets.

She knows it’s never going to bring the men to justice, more than ever now that the media seems to have been banned from showing their faces anywhere, but she likes to think that, wherever they are in the world when the anniversary rolls around, it pisses them off and ruins the day just to know that she is still living, working and breathing somewhere out of their reach.

“…the last article was great, don’t get me wrong, but I think you might have done something extremely illegal to get it written. I mean, I know it’s tough for a woman to make it in a man dominated world because you tell me so every time you leave the house, but how many more times are you going to flaunt the law to get to the story?”

It occurs to Freddie that she should respond to him now, if only to clear her name “I’m not doing anything illegal.”

Fereydoon blinks “Ok. Questionable. These articles mean the world to you, I know, but-”

She stops him before he can crack open that old can of worms.

“But they take me out of the house and you miss me,” she finishes, somewhat wishfully. That is nowhere near to the real reason that he hates her leaving to chase down these stories, but she likes to think that it is one of the more minor reasons that he cannot sleep as well when he knows that she is investigating “I know. I’ll be quick, I promise.”

He frowns “Quick. So you’re really just going there for two nights?”

“Three nights.” she corrects.

She did originally tell him she would only be away for two nights, and knew full well when she was telling him that he would think he had forgotten what she really said and believe whatever she told him. Fereydoon is incredibly easy to manipulate. Although his name translates to something like ‘third son’ in his parent’s language, Fereydoon is the only boy in a house of women, and has been trained very well by his sisters, little and big, and his bustling mother to shut up and do as the women tell him.

“Three nights,” he repeats, without missing a beat “What else do I need to know?”

“That I got into this exclusive means through perfectly reasonable, acceptable, nepotic channels.”

He blinks “Who do you know in the fine arts circle anymore, anyway?”

Freddie doesn’t like to bring this side of her working life into her house, so instead of answering him, she gets him to hold a pile of clothes for her while she untangles the hopelessly snarled coils of her headphones.

On the one hand are the book manuscripts, the mounds of researched compiled from her years in journalism that are meticulously organised in her study, and the chapters that she can call her husband into the room to proof-read. On the other hand are the things that she moonlights, because she likes having the extra money and because she misses stalking accused stalkers and serial killers, and their handlers, more than she would like to admit.  
She may only freelance every now and then, and she may have sold the Tattler a long time ago to another business that quickly turned it into an even trashier rag, but it is still important to her.

Any and every contact having to do with her business in the under-belly of the journalistic world, where her articles are still sought out at high prices- that all stays out of her house. She has no interest in exposing Fereydoon to anymore of that world than he has already seen by just being her partner.

Not after the way it ended, the last time she allowed him to get to close to her business. It could have so easily been him, packing one-handed and dreading the foggy process of putting his prosthetic arm on in a moment.

Now that he has been suitably placated, he moves a few books out of a chair- and has some difficulty finding a place to put the other books, because their whole house looks as if it were just hit by a hurricane composed entirely of reference books and biographies of serial killers- and lets some of the tension out of his shoulders.

“Are you going with one of the artists?”

Freddie waits until his head is tilted up to the ceiling, then slips her handgun, unloaded and wrapped carefully in a few scarves, underneath her winter sweaters “Yeah. She did a great piece for the exhibition.”

“You’ve seen it already? I thought they weren’t going to show them to anyone before the exhibition.”

She shrugs “Well, you caught me. I sneaked a peak.”

“Well, what was it?”

“The whole thing is a farewell to the Great Red Dragon that was eaten, so she thought it was a nice, ironic touch to paint the dragon eating Francis Dolarhyde.”

Fereydoon’s eyebrows shoot up “Nice and gory?”

“Nice and gory.”

“Have fun.”

It only occurs to Freddie later, once she has finished packing the car and kissed her boyfriend goodbye, that the conversation they had last might have been their very last.  
She decides she is not going to think about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What happened to Freddie's arm? For now, let us assume that she lost it in the infamous Baltimore Sharknado. What a tragedy. What a pity.


	14. "That kind of stuff, that kind of lack of empathy, isn’t that sociopathic?”

Hannibal has never found pretence difficult. For him, it is as simple to lie as it is for others to breathe. He first noticed the talent as a very young boy, still living on the family estate and long before the tragedy that would drive him from its walls. Well, the ability, it seemed, a natural ability that progressed beyond simple talent, for spinning up lies so convincing that on the rare occasion he was caught by his parents, it became a challenge to separate Hannibal’s truth from the actual truth.

Besides the standard, early sociopathic years behaviour that he got up to as a child, Hannibal has had years of practice in the fields of medicine and psychology, hiding in plain sight, even assisting those who hunt down murderers even as he commits the murders that they are investigating. He has trained himself and been unintentionally trained by others to master what is now a simple task, of hiding in plain sight. So smoothly, so seamlessly, that sometimes he wonders if he isn’t a member of the flock after all.

But today? Today is challenging his skill in the art of telling whoppers.

When Mira asks him if he is alright, he actually has to stop himself from letting his forehead hit the table and venting his troubles. 

If he were the kind of person who allowed others to know that, yes, he too experiences basic human troubles like the common cold and scaly elbows in the winter and an inability to dry-swallow pills, then he would tell her.

It might go something like; there’s a guard dog in my house, Mira, a dog rabid in her conviction that she must protect me from my own household and my own husband and I am unaware of any way to make her stop unless I am to put her down with my own hands. I believe another spectre from my past has re-entered mine and my husband’s life, but in an indirect manner, by kidnapping one of our old friend’s spouse, whom I fully intend to cook and devour as soon as I have a little bit less, if you will permit the pun, on my plate.  
Also one of the actual dogs has a persistent complaint of the nose. I think she may be allergic to goose down, because it only acts up when she gets on a certain pillow on the couch, but I am not experienced in the health complaints of her species. Do you know anything about a dog’s allergies?

Instead, he corrects the fraction of a slump in his posture and puts on his semi-professional, semi-friendly smile. Yet another trick he has had to master to keep his general amusement and contempt for the people around him a fantasy, of the more social anxious or perceptive people he encounters.

“You look tired,” says Mira “Bags under your eyes.”

Those are far less a common occurrence than they were before. When Will’s night-terrors were a faithful part of the weekly routine- and when the term ‘faithful’ is employed, it is in the context of the Geyser and Yellowstone that erupts so regularly that a watch could be set by it- he used to come into work looking as if he had two black eyes, from staying up with his half-delirious husband to soothe him back to sleep.

Mira bustles into the room and starts stacking up a pile of files on Hannibal’s desk that are likely to eat up his afternoon, once he is done placating the ‘artistes’ over the phone, and some of them in person, wanting to complain to him about the lack of places to stay.   
As if it is somehow his fault that the Malenys’ girl was practicing archery in an inappropriate place and made an ice-skating rink of her parents’ business, which of course, happens to be the only business in the place that would be able to accommodate the influx of artists and artistes that have beset the small town.

This place suffers from the cabin fever mentality that anyone who has business, no matter how short nor long, within the boundaries of the town should also stay within those boundaries for the duration. Entering this town is like entering a small island nation. The others whom Hannibal has debated the issue with seem almost offended at any suggestion that the involved might like to stay in one of the nearby towns, then commute to their daily business here?  
Thank God for small-town generosity. 

“After this, I think you and Mark should get out of town for a little while. You could really use the break, Dr Faust, and God knows that Mark never stops working either.”

She goes to the window and draws the curtains back, letting a puddle of weak sunlight to spill into the room. He cannot help but notice that she looks a lot less bleached and painted today.  
Or it could be that she never looked that way to begin with- that it was just some kind of optical illusion created by the herd of secretaries around her at the time Hannibal judged her to be superfluous to the feminist cause a few weeks earlier. He does seem to remember being in a particularly cruel mind-set that day.

Today, however, her make-up is low-key and simple, and her blouse and trousers are ironed impeccably. He feels far more inclined to sympathise with whatever little troubles she might start spilling to him at any moment.  
Since finding out that he has worked as a psychiatrist in the recent past, Mira has sometimes asked his advice on what she diagnoses to be deep-seated mental issues stemming from her traumatic school experience, where she spent much of her time dodging abrasive nuns in cold stone corridors and receiving detention for forgetting homework.

Hannibal has since judged her, in his own mind and to Will only, to be a perfectly sane and sound individual with a few skeletons in her closet. No different from much of the human race. Certainly not a threat to him or his husband. 

“Oh, gosh, how much more snow do you think we’re going to get?”

Hannibal looks sideways out the window, at the gathering of grey clouds bowing over the cityscape, and is about to estimate a couple more weeks at the very least when a bedraggled chicken power-flaps by the window.

Mira’s mouth falls open. She turns to him, in a mixture of shock and delight “Did you see that chicken?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God. There’s…look at this! There are chickens everywhere! Look, I think that truck must have tipped over. It looks like it was carrying all of those chicken coops to some factory or something. Well, how is that for karma, taking care of the little guys?”

Another chicken sails past the window. Hannibal has to wonder how these chickens are getting so far into the air, with their weak, untested wings, so as to be disturbing business on the third floor. Down the hall, he hears chirps of delight and roars of laughter from others who have discovered the unusual addition to the rush-hour traffic.

He hopes that Will and Margot are not caught in the chaos at the intersection, where the truck lies on its side and the majority of the chickens are making frantic attempts to escape and experience the fresh air for the first time in their short lives. It will make a mess of both Will’s nerves and the car, and he may not be able to stop himself from some kind of ‘chicken crossing the road’ dig later on, assuming that, if Will is immersed in the feathers, that he survives the experience at all.

“I almost forgot. Dr Faust, your first appointment of the day is here. Should I send her through?”

Mentally, he gives himself a shake and a slap, telling himself to pull it together. To push all concerns as to his husband’s health and what horrors Chiyoh might be planning to compromise said health, so he can treat the artists, or artistes, whichever one it may be, with the respect and attention they deserve for getting their work into this exhibition in the first place.

The woman that Mira leads through the door is the kind of woman who attracts the eyes of all in the room at her entrance, if only for a fleeting moment. Had Hannibal not been out of the market for a romantic interest, and by now, a spouse for the last seven years, he might have been tempted to court her for a little while. If only for his own amusement, and to provide some diversion in the lonely hours of the early mornings.

Consulting his memory-bank, Hannibal dredges up the name: Mercy Waters.  
A noted philanthropist, whose wallet is so fat with the earnings from her family’s business of textiles (with branches extending as far as Polynesia and India) that she gives the impression of sweating money. She and her family nearly came to blows when she made the choice to become an artist, rather than a textiles baroness, but they have reconciled by now.

He has a faint recollection of attending a dinner party, given by a host whose name and career have slipped his mind, where Mercy Waters gave an impassioned speech about her recent trip to Nicaragua, and how devastating the poverty that she witnessed there was. Hannibal distinctly remembers that Bedelia was with him, and he amused her by remarking on how the best speakers on the issues of poverty seem to have to have a glass of Cognac in their hands before they can really get going.

Mercy Waters will not recognise him. Their introduction was brief, and anyway, Hannibal has found that his face is easily mistaken for that of an innocent man these days. Not once in the last four years has he been told he bears even a passing resemblance to the Chesapeake Ripper. Even Will tells him that he doesn’t look like his old self anymore- he refers to it as Hannibal’s ‘married man’ face, however, whatever that might mean.

“Dr Faust,” Mercy Waters’ lip-sticked mouth curls into an attractively shy, or rather, coy smile, and she extends a ring-laden hand to shake his “Hello.”

Hannibal stands and shakes her hand. Underneath the layers of moisturiser are the cracks and callouses, befitting the hands of an artist (not an artiste) devoted to her profession. 

“Ms Waters. I believe you are the artist responsible for the lot 17 in the exhibition?”

She smiles again “Yes, I am.”

“That caused quite a stir when it came in, if I may say. The moment they put it up, there was a small crowd gathered around it.”   
Mira tucks a stray curl of blonde hair behind her ear, suddenly nervous by the sheer level of artistic prowess and academic success that has been squeezed into the room by Mercy Waters’ arrival.

Mira went to a community college after escaping (graduating) from her Catholic high-school- probably in this very town, but Hannibal has never thought it appropriate or relevant to ask her, since she is so adept at her job anyway. Mercy, on the other hand, attended some kind of prestigious liberal arts college and made a name for herself very early in the game.

Mercy Waters is the kind of woman who has made a hobby out of going to art galleries, or writing short poems that are bound to be short-listed for a national award, if they do not win it.  
Mira, on the other hand, has admitted to reserving the majority of her weekends to getting a full use out of her ‘World of Warcraft’ subscription. In itself, this is no less noble a use of one’s time, but in the office of a curator of an art museum, it is not something that one would admit to.

“Can I get you a drink Ms Waters?” asks Mira, eager to be excused from the room.

“Just some tea, would be nice.”

“Which type do you drink?”

Mercy Waters wrinkles her nose in thought “Oh, just any old brand will do, as long as it keeps me awake. Not that I expect you to bore me, you understand, Dr Faust. A friend of mine who’s coming to the opening night of the exhibition with me just came into town. I’m afraid we were rather like teenage girls, last night. We stayed up late with a quart of ice-cream to catch up. I look terribly tired, don’t I?”

Not so much as a smudge of shadow underneath either eye, so either she is just as talented with her make-up as with her paints, or she is some variety of an undead species that does not require sleep. 

“You look fine, Ms Waters.”

She smiles that winning smile again “Oh, please, call me Mercy.”

He nods “Mercy.”

She waits for him to extend a similar invitation to use his first name, and when the pause for this invitation stretches out to an uncomfortable, awkward length, collects herself with a slight cough at the back of her throat and folds her hands neatly in her lap. The pencil skirt and blouse she wears are immaculate, but designed to give the impression of comfort. Besides that, the woman is so relaxed in the clothes that she might as well have strolled into his office in her best-loved set of pyjamas.

“Dr Faust, I am sorry to have disturbed you so soon to the opening of the exhibition. I’m certain you must be frightfully busy.”

He could, if he were the kind of person to make idle discussion, relate a recent near-duel he had over the phone with one of the caterers for the event, who wanted to know exactly why the hell he should have to provide halal options if America was a Christian country. Or the influx of letters recently received from the PTA organisation a few towns over, claiming it was irresponsible to idolise serial killers, as it might encourage the children to follow in their footsteps.

Also, at least one officer has expressed concern to him (though not by an official complaint; it was the familiar, friendly Officer Sharon Johansson who mentioned it to him in the check-out line at the bakery the other Saturday while wrangling her small son, who was screaming for cake) that the exhibition might encourage another violent, display from the Hand of Jophiel, if they felt they were being challenged or undermined by the metaphorical witch-burning of another high-profile serial killer in the art gallery.

But Mercy Waters is not the kind of woman who wants to hear troubles, unless they can be compacted into small, witty anecdotes suitable to the atmosphere of a jovial cock-tail party, and Hannibal has neither the desire nor the energy to indulge this.

“Yes, busy, but for a worthwhile cause.”

“Indeed. I was so distressed to hear the Great Red Dragon had been destroyed, when it happened. Can you imagine what kind of a lunatic the man must have been, to think that he could become the Dragon by eating it?” a hand flutters up to her white breast, as if offended to even consider it “It’s a good thing he didn’t think he was the Mona Lisa, or the art community would be in even more of an uproar than it is now.”

He allows himself a brief chuckle at the thought of Francis Dolarhyde, slavering over the famous painting, and Mercy Waters is pleased, thinking that she has entertained him.

“Dr Faust, what I wanted to talk to you about is my speech. I wanted your input, before I finalise my draft and memorise the dratted thing.”

Each of the artists are expected to give a small talk about what their piece is meant to reflect and the ways in which they felt the grief of the loss of the painting once they had gotten the news, almost four years ago, of the Dragon’s demise. This will be a short but inevitably boring portion of the evening before the guests are allowed to go mingle and gape and the artists, complain about the placement of their paintings and decide amongst themselves which one of them got the position of the most honour and respect.

Hannibal is not pleased that he has had to carve out a half hour of his unforgivably busy schedule to advise this woman on a subject that she could easily Google.   
Still, when he took this job, he knew that it would require a certain amount of graciousness and patience. The art world is full of tolerable and intolerable people in equal measure. At this stage in their acquaintanceship, Hannibal is not yet sure which one Mercy should be classed as, but for now he’s going to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that she is a nervous public speaker. 

If her speech on Nicaragua is anything to go by, she might well need a few sips of exorbitantly expensive sherry before she can really get up on her soap-box.

They discuss what she should discuss in great detail. Mercy Waters is obviously eager to stretch her half hour for as long as she can. Mira comes in twice, first with the freshly made cups of tea (with a splash of gin in Hannibal’s, the fantastic woman) and secondly to inform him that his second appointment of the day expects to be late because the chickens are apparently clogging up every street but the back roads. 

By the end of what has turned into a very long forty-five minutes, Mercy Waters has invited Hannibal, and his charming husband, of course, the teacher, up to the little house she has borrowed. From an elderly aunt, who is visiting a lover in Nigeria and who might not come back, don’t you know, if that lover decides to actually pop the question this time, does Dr Faust know- ah, yes, you do, you know the Matron Whittaker. Isn’t it funny that she calls herself ‘Matron’, when I know for a fact that she has no less than three young lovers in Africa alone- oh, Mr Carter, here you are.

The late man, whose name is almost as unfortunate and mesmerising as his large nose, Carter Carter is lead in by Mira. His jacket is peppered with snow and a few stray wisps of chicken down. 

Delighted by his windswept appearance, Mercy Waters covers her mouth in a gesture of amusement that reminds Hannibal in a strange way of a Disney princess. 

“Oh my. You got caught in the chicken accident then?”

Carter Carter shakes his head in wonder “The sheer number of poultry- amazing, you have to see for yourself, Mercy, otherwise you’d never believed it happened. Am I late? Oh, only by 15 minutes, well, I am sorry Dr Faust but I suppose that is excusable.”

Mercy Waters lifts herself out of her chair and, with a prim nod of her head, departs, saying “I will see you gentlemen at the exhibition. And Dr Faust, please do call me. I look forward to hosting you and Mark at the Matron’s house this weekend.”

Once Mira has showed her out, Mr Carter drops into the vacated seat with the air of someone who has just climbed from a pile of rubble. He is not a large man, but the thickness of the full yellow beard and mutton-chop sideburns that decorates his face make him look rather like a small, blond bear. He’s got the most impressive nose Hannibal has ever seen, which makes him wonder what such a nose would look like, say, were Mason Verger to detach it and attempt to wear it. Like a Halloween witch’s nose, no doubt.

“Dr Faust.”

Hannibal can tell by his expression that whatever they are about to discuss does not pertain to his entry in the exhibition- a tasteful piece that depicts Francis Dolarhyde, falling from the sun afire, his red wings spread, Icarus-like. 

“You were a psychiatrist once, yes?”

Ah. Shit.

“Yes I was.” Hannibal takes a second to arrange himself more comfortably in his chair, and unconsciously crosses a leg under the desk, the way he used to do when he was still in the profession “Something is troubling you, Mr Carter?”

He is well aware of what an obvious invitation that is for the man to come spilling his darkest secrets and fears all over Hannibal’s polished hardwood floors and desk, but he might as well. There is no polite way he can think of immediately to excuse himself from the awkwardness that is about to ensue, so the best course of action seems to be to just bite the bullet and to allow the man to talk. Besides, it will be an interesting story to share with Will, on the off-chance that Will survives the chicken hurricane still raging outside.

“How…you could tell if a person was crazy, couldn’t you?”

Hannibal has never really lost his psychiatrist’s eye. Once you learn to read people and perfect the talent for a living, then you never really lose it, even once you are no longer officially practicing. Clearly, Mr Carter is not talking about himself. A close friend, or a loved one.

“What do you mean by ‘crazy’, Mr Carter? I’m sure a well-educated man such as yourself is aware that there really is no such thing as ‘crazy’. There is certainly insanity, but ‘crazy’, that is a term that would have been most readily employed in the asylums of the 50s and 60s. In modern psychiatry, the word is no longer used.”

He frowns “Alright, alright, whatever you say. It’s just…listen, I’ve got some books out of the library. I’ve looked it up. I even talked to my sister. Her girlfriend is a psychiatrist, and she’s told me that it sounds like my son might be a sociopath.”

Hannibal cocks an eyebrow. Given that Carter Carter is a local artist, he is familiar with his son. A strapping boy by the name of Samson, who takes after his Biblical namesake with a startling accuracy. If he wore his hair long and flowing, Hannibal would have to stop himself from cautioning the child against women named Delilah every time he sees him.  
And, of course, Hannibal would agree with this diagnosis, to some extent.

Evidently, because it was conducted over the phone and the mentioned doctor-girlfriend has probably never seen Samson in person, it is somewhat inaccurate.   
Under-estimating Samson, as it were. Though Hannibal does not claim to have spent much time in the boy’s company, beyond receiving a sullen nod in greeting whenever he sees the boy and his father in public, he knows another predator when he sees one, in the way that a lion will grudgingly acknowledge the hissing house-cat, as it paces outside of the lion’s enclosure, at least smart enough not to get close enough to be struck.

Yes, he knows Samson Carter well enough, and well enough to understand his father’s concerns.

“Why do you think Samson is a sociopath, Mr Carter? Was there an event that triggered this?”

The man tugs at the collar of his button-down shirt, which has a small sweat ring at the left armpit “I…I don’t know. I haven’t always been here for Samson. His mother and I divorced when he was only five and that bi- that woman, she took me for everything, including my son. But she died when he was ten, and now he’s lived with me ever since. Don’t get me wrong, Dr Faust, I love my son. I love him more than anything, but I just…I don’t think he loves me. I don’t think he knows what love is. That kind of stuff, that kind of lack of empathy, isn’t that sociopathic?”

“Some would say. How old is Samson now?”

“He’s sixteen.”

“Mr Carter, that is a difficult age-”

Mr Carter’s face flushes in a combination of anger and embarrassment “You think I haven’t considered that it’s just him being a teenager? Trying to distance himself from me? That’s not what it is, Dr Faust. It’s not that he’s an introvert either- I mean, yes he is, sure he is and that is fine by me, but he’s just too introverted. It’s like he doesn’t know where he is half of the time. I had him tested for Asperger’s and autism when he was twelve, and nothing came back positive.”

In the pit of Hannibal’s stomach, there is something like hunger stirring. Not a physical hunger, but a curiosity. A hunger to know what is going on behind the dull blue eyes that he remembers, set far back into the boy’s head, and completely disinterested in what was occurring around him. He considers his options.   
Given his talent with the spoken word and the unspoken truth, Hannibal could easily send Carter Carter out of his office, flustered and embarrassed and convinced that he was wrong all along. Or, he could fan the flames, and watch the way the fire would grow and climb and what it would consume.

Well, whatever he does, he’s going to have to talk to Will about it. After all, a marriage is a partnership, and if Hannibal thinks he might want to investigate this strange report of a possible sociopath, then he has to let Will know of the impending danger. In addition to that, Will might have some valuable insight. Hannibal doesn’t know everything there is to know about the criminal mind.  
His husband, on the other hand…

Before he passes judgement on Mr Carter, Hannibal decides to give him a poke. In the same way that he would catch flies and pull a single wing off as a child, just to see how successful the resulting escape attempts would be, Hannibal says the following to Mr Carter: “Mr Carter, I am going to be frank with you. Are you trying to tell me that you think Samson may be involved with the cult?”

Mr Carter’s eyes widen, glassy and afraid “Yes,” he rasps “Do you know…do you know what that’s like? Wondering if your baby boy is murdering other people’s children?”

“No, Mr Carter. My husband and I are childless.”

“Will…will you talk to him? I need to know.”

“I’m afraid this is not a decision I can make lightly. There are a number of reasons I left the psychiatric practice for,” he gestures around the office, with a wry twist of his lips that might have resolved itself into a smile if he were at home “The infinitely less stressful world of art, and many of those reasons affect my husband. I will need to talk to him before I can decide anything.”

Mr Carter’s thick, blond eyebrows shoot up, giving for a moment the impression that his bear, side-burns and eyebrows have all melded into a mane of unruly facial hair “Mark? What does Mark Faust know about psychiatry?”

“His name is Columbus, Mr Carter, and he knows a great deal.”

Mira pops her head around the door “Dr Faust, your husband is on the phone. He says he’s stranded in the chicken storm and he wants you to call him when you get the chance. Something about your dogs being sick?”

Being that they cannot openly discuss the intricacies of their business of murder on the phone-lines, Will and Hannibal employ a set of coded phrases and passwords to exchange information, when it needs to be passed on during the day.  
When Will mentions that the dogs are feeling ill, and it was not true before either of them left for work, then it means that someone, or something, from their past has come back or is on their way back.

Not exactly what Hannibal wants to hear right now, considering how stressful the week is already looking.

“Can you talk to him now? I mean, I’ll get out of your hair, but please, Dr Faust, do it soon. I’m desperate.”

Without another word, Mr Carter gathers himself up, struggles back into his jacket and flees. A backward glance over his shoulder shows Hannibal that the man’s eyes gleam with fear and guilt. If Samson and his father eat dinner together, then Hannibal almost pities the man for how awkward it is going to be tonight.

Sighing, he scoops up his phone and waits for Will’s to connect.

When it does, Will has to raise his voice to be heard over a cacophony of clucking and flapping and the muted screams of the few unfortunates who have somehow found themselves caught in the middle.

“Hannibal?”

“Yes, dear.” he is aware of Mira listening outside “What is troubling the dogs now?”

“Bedelia.”

It has been a long time since Hannibal has experience a sensation resembling fear- not since he and Will were recovering from the encounter with Dolarhyde, when he was genuinely concerned that his wounds might be the death of him and leave Will all alone in the world. But now?  
Now his blood runs cold.

“Really?” 

Will knows him too well to miss the minute tremble in his voice “Our friend assures me she knows what she is talking about. She’s going to need our help, to bring the dogs back to safety. Health-wise, I mean.”

“Are both of them ill?”

“Yes.”

“And would you say it is terminal?”

Alarmed, Mira pauses in the doorway, in the act of pretending that she had to stack some files on the bookshelf beside the door.

“If we don’t get them the correct treatment.”

“Ah, so there is still time, is there?”

“Plenty, if we use it well.”

Mira relaxes. She adores the dogs almost as much as she adores their owner. 

“I have to go, Hannibal. I’ll see you at home.”

“Drive safely, then.”

“I will. Love you.”

“I love you too.”

Hannibal hangs up and drops his phone onto the surface of his desk, in disgust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, the art gallery exhibition is approaching, and I can assure you it's gonna be one hell of a night for everyone involved. All the big characters will be there. Maybe meeting and greeting. Recognising each other too.  
> Won't that be fun?


	15. In the aftermath of unrequited obsession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited this chapter while the new kitten, Garcia Marquez after the Colombian writer, challenged my toes for dominance over the kingdom of Bedroom.  
> Accidentally wrote 'Kitten' several times while attempting to correct spelling, and I had to go over 10 pages for this one. Whew
> 
> Also, here comes everyone's favourite spurned woman and her wrath

Each of Bedelia du Maurier’s days begin in the same way.

First, she awakes from the dream. It is referred to in the journal that she has taken to keeping, so she can record her most intimate thoughts and musings when the company is too dull to fully appreciate these thoughts and musings, as ‘The Dream’. For the past three and a half years, it has been impossible for her to dream of anything else.

The Dream is an especially insidious nightmare, because it is not a nightmare, but rather, a clear, crystal-crisp memory of the worst few hours of her life, which she is forced to live over and over again each time she closes her eyes. Had Bedelia had the willpower to make an insomniac of herself, she would have done so. Sometimes, at the end of a bad week, to avoid The Dream for a few more hours, or even another day, if she is feeling desperate, she injects herself with adrenalin.

More often than not, the adrenalin gives her a fit. Her nerves and blood must be ruined by the excess by now, but she doesn’t care. What happens to her physical body is no longer of a great concern to her. She has the funds and medical technology with which to repair whatever she breaks in the pursuit of her true goal- purifying her mind.

If it is the last thing that she manages to do consciously, Bedelia is determined to have a night’s sleep that is not haunted, interrupted or otherwise disturbed by The Dream.

The Dream follows the exact same progression of events. Only the intensity with which she experiences the sensations- the fogginess of the drugs they filled her with, the occasional jabs of pain that made it through the haze of the anaesthetic, and of fear, so much fear- varies from night to night. Sometimes, in The Dream, she focuses on Will and sees him only. More often than not, though, she is looking at Hannibal and thinking the same things that went through her head as when she was being made to eat segments of herself at the dinner table with him and his prize.

She finds herself saying these things out loud to herself. A list of her favourite, or the one she believes to be the most telling and impassioned, are listed in the journal:

1) “What did I do to offend you so badly that you have to eat me?”  
2) “How did I earn this punishment?”  
3) “Will you eat him too?”  
4) “Are you happy without me, Hannibal?”  
5) “What does that dull scrap of a man give to you that I cannot give?”

And, her personal favourite, and the one which crops up the most frequently: 

6) “How will I win you back, Hannibal?”

They come into her house. 

They drug her, and when she wakes up, she is bound to a chair and packed into the scandal of a dress that she knew Hannibal had procured for her, long ago, especially for the occasion. Showed off a lot of skin, the way a butcher hangs up the prize cuts of meat in the window of their shop. 

And they sit down to the meal.  
Her leg, made into a fantastic kalua-roast garlanded with flowers and ti leaves of a startling shade of green. She still can’t fathom where Hannibal got the ingredients from, but it sometimes amuses her to think of him and Will as travellers, and Hannibal having an especially designated suitcase where he hoarded his best and most rare ingredients and spices. 

As always, the smell of her own leg makes her mouth water. 

There are chairs waiting to be filled, and when they are, Bedelia is both surprised and offended that Hannibal is not with Will when he joins her in the dining room.

Will is apologetic “He isn’t feeling well at the moment.”

For a moment, Bedelia is sure that Will has killed him. Allowed him to die, perhaps, in the cold waters where they sought refuge from the intrusion of the FBI agents coming to reclaim the Ripper and the Dragon.   
But then she noticed something on Will’s finger that completely dispelled the notion.

She hears the disgust ringing in her own voice “Is that an engagement ring?”

He laughs at her- something he never would have done before “No, it’s not. It’s just decoration.”

Bedelia could not be persuaded otherwise.

They talked. Bedelia has had The Dream enough that she is able to record a different part of the conversation each time. After almost four years of the same dream, she has managed to compile the majority of the conversation. Taking it with a grain of salt, of course, because dream amnesia has certainly robbed some details from her.

WILL: You think I have killed him?

ME: You could never kill him.

WILL: I wouldn’t

ME: Oh, spare me, you and I both know it is only a matter of time before your conscience returns to you. You’re a man of reason and logic, Will, and not the primal logic that Hannibal subscribes too. This quaint little Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ never accounted for…for creatures such as him. He sees himself as outside of the system entirely and everything within the system of survival has been placed for his amusement. 

WILL: and his dining pleasure

ME: you think you can control him?

WILL: in what world can anyone control Hannibal Lecter? 

ME: he wasted away in captivity for three years while you played house with that skank and her son

(a side note, scribbled hastily in red pen in the margin, as it came back to her at some point in the day: ‘he seems surprised that I mention his family, as if he has already forgotten them, or given up all notion of returning to them’  
‘This makes me more afraid of him than ever before’)

WILL: I believe we can refer to that as a ‘grace period’ to allow me to get my shit together, so he could wreck it again

ME: eloquent. But you don’t deny that you controlled him 

WILL: no I don’t, but you’re not taking into account the fact that I ended up with him again. He was controlling and influencing everything I did in those three years just as much as I affected him.

ME: and all without exchanging a single word in person, for three years. How romantic

(‘I sound so pathetic and bitter I can hardly believe it’s me. No man has ever had the ability to make me feel like trash, not even in high-school, but H.L. is doing a wonderful job and he doesn’t even have to sit at my table with my cooked leg to do it’)

WILL: even Bluebeard had to settle down some time, didn’t he?

(‘Will serves me. He does it with skill that means either he has had training from H.L., or more likely, he still remembers the tricks of the trade from a summer job as a waiter when he was a teenager.’  
Best cut of meat I have ever tasted.’)

ME: why make me wait? Fear ruins the taste of the meat, you know

WILL: you’re actually complaining about this meal?

ME: where have you been for the last half a year? Honey-mooning?

WILL: I guess you could call it that

ME: (‘jealousy; so bad I think I have the odd sensation of my skin turning inside out’) look at what he has done to me and then tell me that he won’t do the same to you.   
He is playing right now, do you understand? He fought long and hard for you. He put you and himself through every single layer of hell Dante could have possibly described or imagined, and you have both come out of the other side. Hannibal is triumphant, and you? Well, you’ve been groomed into what he wanted all along. That empathy has turned into apathy

(‘I wait for him to grow angry, but he does not. I no longer have any power over him, I believe, because he is no longer afraid of what goes on inside his head. At this point, I am just an annoyance’)

ME: where is he?

WILL: if you must know, he caught a cold in Quebec. Cooking your leg wiped him out completely, so don’t expect too much out of him if he does get up again today

(‘I later find out that H.L. is sleeping in the guest bedroom, but not under the sheets, because the sheets were not disturbed. I guess he must have just fallen straight across the bed and gone to sleep once he washed his hands of the oil he used to cook me’)

At this point, the dream shuffles forward through time, and it is both of them, both of her tormentors, and they are all eating once more. The meal remains as warm as if it were pulled right from the oven, so Bedelia does not know if her leg was really there between her and Will in the first place, or if she had dreamed that into The Dream.  
(‘They sit beside each other. Hannibal belongs at the head of the table, but he sits beside Will. This devastates me’)

H.L.: would you return that to the table, please? That tined fork underneath your thigh

(‘I do not ask how he knows that I have it’)

ME: I suppose I should be flattered you are still aware of my thighs at all, given our present company. Charming ring, Hannibal, for a charming gesture

H.L.: Are you under the impression that we are engaged?

WILL: a relationship like that would be difficult to sustain on the lam. What court in the world would let the FBI’s second most wanted man and his hostage get hitched?

ME: I think you’re both engaged in the process of making a fatal mistake. Of course, because it’s only a matter of time before Hannibal saws a limb off while you sleep, Will, and serves it to you as bacon with breakfast. And Will, you must surely have some serious commitment issues, what, with that empathy disorder clouding your judgement and your emotions

(‘Neither of them rise to the bait. I am nothing more than a loose end to tie up before they disappear into their own, shared life’  
‘Can’t stop eating myself- sounds filthy, like the title of a porno, but this is how I remember thinking it. I would be crying if I wasn’t so goddamned mad about having to put the fork back on the table’)

 

And then she loses the rest of it. She must have just complained at them all night long, and engaged in a duel of verbal barbs with Hannibal, and shot Will a lot of dirty looks, because she seems to remember being a little too afraid of Will to say much to him.  
Bedelia never gave much thought to the man when she was in Hannibal’s life. Not even in Italy. She considered the fact that Hannibal had come to Italy with her as a victory, and did not want to distract herself from her happiness more than necessary by thinking of what he was doing.

It was only when it became apparent that, while Hannibal had not been physically dishonest with her, his heart was definitely not in their little arrangement. She may have gone in knowing full well that she was entering a pseudo marriage, but she did not go in knowing how truly and deeply her false husband was actually able to love.  
What killed her was that it was not her that he could bring himself to love. Instead, some Louisiana white trash; so obsessed with denying himself and his talents that he almost had no solid ego on which Hannibal could wreak his havoc.

And there were other problems beside… was Bedelia really so pathetic in her attempt to satisfy that she couldn’t even persuade Hannibal to stick to the same gender? Did she really spoil women so much for him that he had to move onto his own gender to find a semblance of contentment with a partner?

She has grown to hate Will more than she could ever hate Hannibal over the last three and a half years.

Above and beyond the fact that he somehow managed to attract a man she had had her eyes on for years and had been grooming to be hers, with little in the way of grace and almost nothing in the way of the cultured, calculating skill that is required when dealing and conversing with brutal, brilliant people such as the good Doctor (in Bedelia’s mind, anyway), Bedelia is offended by Will’s persistence in survival.  
The man had a hole drilled in the side of his head and was bouncing about, taking chunks out of butler’s faces not two days later. Honestly, what kind of human being is that resilient?

Of course, Bedelia would gladly exact her revenge on Hannibal was well, if she were given the chance, but in a toss-up between the two…say, if she had them both helpless, and only one bullet in the gun, she would rather put a bullet between Will Graham’s eyes than Hannibal’s. If only out of curiosity, to see if Hannibal’s reaction would be one of agony, or shock, or grief, or if she was right all along, and that there is no room in Hannibal’s people suit to accommodate a heart that is capable of real, human love.

Her money is on nothing but a small, warped smile, which she hopes will be followed by a “Thank you, Bedelia.”

After she has recovered from The Dream, generally by lying still on her back for 10 minutes, waiting to see if she will cry this time, she forces her one, independently working arm from her sheets and over to the nightstand, where there is a buzzer to ring for help.

Her carer is a beautiful Filipina woman who took the job the moment it was proffered, despite the state of the woman who was to be her employer. It was essentially an airlift out of the slums where she had grown up and expected to raise her children, so Liezel did not care that it meant moving up into the frozen-nowhere of rural Russia and taking care of the physical needs of a woman, so withered by poisons and cyanide, that she refuses to have mirrors in the house.

Bedelia had a plan. She was well aware that Hannibal was coming for her, and had kept the dress with the specific intention of putting it on to greet him. This was her plan: she was to poison herself with a potent mixture of cyanide, arsenic and a few other, cobbled together from trace elements, chemists and illegally supplied, alternate channels, then allow Hannibal (and Will) to consume her flesh. They would then froth, spasm and die in front of her eyes, as she would not long after, but she figured she would have about five minutes to celebrate.

She did not count on not receiving a warning that her company was coming. Or not having the time to ingest the poisons. Least of all, of surviving the experience. She took enough poison to finish off an entire secret intelligence agency, and yet, somehow, she has survived.

The doctors attending to what little was left and usable of her body chattered over her head about miracles and providence and an unusually quick metabolism, while Bedelia attempted to straighten her head and drooled constantly from one side of her newly slackened mouth.

She thought Mason Verger was a fright, from the one or two pictures she had seen of him after his encounter with Hannibal (likely taken without his knowledge). But the way she looks now?  
It would be enough to reduce even him to tears, and to make the elephant man look beautiful.

This morning, the Liezel, the carer, comes in especially early. As far as Bedelia is concerned, she is asleep and should remain treated as such until she calls for Liezel. 

Until Bedelia calls her, Liezel fusses over the curtains, the objects on the dresser that need straightening and makes a show of sweeping the dust off the windowsills.

When it becomes apparent that no new details are going to be rescued from the fog of her subconscious for the journal, Bedelia tilts her head up, watching the starched white uniform of her carer at the back of the gloom of the closet. Somewhere in there, Bedelia has the very dress that she wore on the night.

“Liezel.”

She turns and smiles, putting the coat that she was brushing free from lint back on the rack “How are you feeling today, Ms du Maurier?”

“Help me up.”

She doesn’t like that question, and has lost count of the number of times she has told Liezel not to ask it. She can’t get it through the woman’s head, however. 

Liezel lifts Bedelia up and lowers her into the waiting wheelchair. Handling her remaining limbs carefully, Liezel guides Bedelia into a loose, comfortable sundress. Gone are the days of pencil skirts and starched blouses. Most of Bedelia’s life is spent in some kind of pain, and clothes with restrict or in some way inhibit what little range of movement she has available to her induce an acute mental anguish that has brought her to silent tears many times. For the sake of her health, and her sanity, it is better that she dresses in the most loose-fitting attire. 

It also makes it easier and quicker for Liezel to get her to the bed-pan. 

Once she has selected the scarf for the day, with Bedelia’s instruction, and bound it around her pitted head, she drives the wheelchair into the hallway.

“Would you like to attend to your…your guests, first, or have a cup of tea?”

Bedelia cannot abide the thought of showing herself to the Vergers, with brown stains spotting her dress and skin, simply because she has not yet figured out a way to drink through a straw with a mouth that hangs like a mummy’s without making a mess of her front. Somehow, there’s always one intrepid spot that gets through whatever bib Liezel might try to protect her wardrobe with.

“Attend to the guests, I think.”

Nodding, Liezel steers her into the chair-lift, a specially designed elevator that was added to the house Bedelia bought to accommodate her disability. Downstairs is where they keep the automated wheelchair most of the time, because Bedelia complains of being too tired and distracted to manage the task of steering around the unwieldy thing, first thing in the morning.  
And anyway, she can’t really get into the chair by herself, let alone select her clothes or go through her morning routine of washing and brushing.

“Has your girl asked after the boy again?”

Liezel’s face darkens for just the briefest second, and Bedelia guesses that she wishes she had stood behind the chair.

“No,” she says too quickly “No, I haven’t let them talk to each other since the first time.”

Bedelia would cock an eyebrow at her if it were still within her capacity “Ah.”

“Security hasn’t reported anything new, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

“That is good.”

No it’s not. Bedelia knew that there was little to no chance of the woman caving to the pressure of her separation and incarceration, but the son should at least be showing signs of wear and tear by now. Although the two of them have not been split once against their will since they arrived, the son is a spoiled, boy of the world who spent the majority of his conscious life travelling around Europe on his mothers’ dime. He is not an ill-mannered child, but nor is he in the habit of being forced to do something which he does not want to do.

And yet he hasn’t so much as had one crying fit since the first day?

Besides that, she wants security threats. She wants to know that her men are gradually being picked off from their isolated positions, where they watch Hannibal and Will’s old haunts. She wants to know that she has been sent the finger of one of her top people in an envelope that was addressed in calligraphy and perhaps lightly perfumed by blood. 

When they arrive downstairs, they do not stop at the official first floor, where Bedelia would receive her guests if she still received people from the outside world, but pass beneath it, to the basement. The basement is no more than an average-sized room.

Large enough to be furnished for comfort. After all, Bedelia’s guests were not brought to this place to be broken and destroyed.  
They were brought to wait, and Bedelia is not a cruel person. Her captors deserve the comfort they are used to, so she has given them access to a small library, by putting up bookshelves on almost every wall, each of which is well-stocked. She is confident that the woman would never attempt to kill herself or her son with the heavy furniture, but it has all been bolted into place all the same.

Next, there is a writing desk with a large, plush chair, where the woman sits currently. She has turned the chair around so she can watch her son. The boy is stretched out on the floor on his belly with a few pencils in his hand, one in his teeth, and smudging the outline of a figure in a drawing he has just finished to create the effect of a shadow.  
Bedelia watches this with interest, through the glass. Three side of the room are solid, grey wall, now decorated by the child’s drawings. Practically in a spectrum, so the fantastic improvements in his works can be tracked. His months of captivity have given him a terrible ennui and a fear that seems to be only conquered when he has a pencil in his hand and a sheet of paper underneath it.

The fourth wall is, of course, solid, thick, bullet-proof glass that can only be opened by putting in three separate passwords into several different keypads across the mansion, and then require Bedelia’s fingerprints to be recorded onto the computer station, where one of the guards sits, absorbed in a Jo Nesbo mystery, before the glass will slide away into the side of the basement.

So that Bedelia can be heard, Liezel presses the intercom on the computer station and sits back.

“Hieronymus, show me what that is.”

She is always painfully aware of slurring her speech when she speaks to them. The boy, in particular.

With a quick glance at Alana, the boy gets up, goes to the glass and pushes his completed drawing to the glass. Bedelia squints and mutters appreciatively.

“Are you familiar with the work of Giacometti?”

Hieronymus shakes his head “Who was he?”

“An Italian sketch artist. More famous for his abstract work in sculpture, but I believe the drawings are really where the passion of the man is manifested. You can see both the worship with which he treated the shapes he butchered, and the scorn he had for the reality in which they existed. I believe there is a book on art history in there somewhere? Look for him in the index.”

Hieronymus backs away, to his mother’s side, under the pretence of delivering the drawing to her. Alana smiles and winds an arm around his narrow shoulders. Then, unabashed, despite his age, her seven-year-old crawls into her lap and makes her put her arms around his chest. He toys with the rings on her finger, spinning her engagement ring absently by the polished stone mounted on the band.

They sit at the back of the cell.

Hieronymus is frightened of Bedelia. The glass is tinted whenever she comes, but he knows that whatever lies beyond the opaque greyness that precedes each one of her visits is horrifying. Bedelia doubts the boy is really so shallow as to allow her physical deformity to prevent him from liking her. He is a child, but children are often those who forgive the disfigured for their ugliness the most readily.

What he knows to fear is the agenda that landed him in this cell in the first place.

“Good morning Bedelia.” says Alana, civilly enough.

Alana has been perfectly civil ever since they gave her child back. At the beginning of their stay, she hurled herself at the tinted glass and screamed profanities that even Bedelia did not fully understand, such was their foulness.   
Since then, they moved her into this furnished cell, gave her a bathroom, square meals and an excess of books to curb her boredom. Most importantly, her son. The room has twin beds, but more often than not Alana ends up stretched out beside her son, on top of the sheets, a hand on his brow while her eyes scan the room, suspicious and weary.

“Good morning Alana.” she responds. 

A single drop of drool lands on her shoulder. Liezel darts forward and swabs it up on a handkerchief, which she quickly disposes of in a metal trashcan at the guard’s station.

“I take it Margot hasn’t rolled into your estate with a tank yet?”

Hieronymus smiles “No, Mom, we agreed that she was going to use an army of trained, mutant polar bears to break in. Remember? She wanted to take me to see them, so she’d bring them to me.”

Alana bounces her knees underneath him, prompting a giggle and a frantic scramble to maintain balance.

It irks her that they have maintained their fighting spirit throughout the last two months. Lack of sunlight, lack of freedom- not even permitted to see the faces of their kidnappers, and yet, they treat the cell as if it were a beach and Margot has only gone to get a fresh bottle of water from the car.

“Alana, you will know when your wife comes, because I will serve her head to you on a silver platter.”

This is not in Bedelia’s plans at all, but her fantasies. The only reason she says this is so Alana will cover Hieronymus’s ears to drown out the latter half of the threat.

As usual, he protests “What did she say? Tell me what she said.”

Alana shakes her head “Nothing. Just something nasty.”

“Come on, tell me. I’ve heard lots of bad stuff already.”

“So why would I want to let you hear more of that stuff?”

Bedelia enjoys making a pest of herself, in whatever small ways she can. Because apparently kidnapping the Verger-Blooms and sticking them in a room approximately the size of a college dorm-room was not enough.

“Is there anything you need?”

They stop arguing and begin to exchange whispers under their breath.  
The guard picks up a pair of headphones and listens carefully, through microphones planted all over the room. He does so hesitantly, because Hieronymus has figured out where at least two of the microphones are and whenever he suspects the guard is listening in, he will go over and burp and shout into it, fit to deafen the poor bastard on duty.

Having conferenced and decided that they neither need nor want anything from their captor, Alana reports that no, they do not need anything, but they sincerely hope that she has a heart attack so they will be freed.

“Have as good a day as you can have in there.” says Bedelia in parting.

Liezel wheels her away to get the day started, and a moment later, the tint is switched off. Now that he can see one of his tormentors, Hieronymus goes to the glass again and begins to pull faces. The guard pretends to ignore him for fifteen minutes, then switches the tint off.

“Excuse me,” says Alana “Could we have some music on, please?”

“Sure.” says the guard, his voice bouncing all around on the intercoms “Which track?”

“How about track 18?”

A moment later, the sound of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No.2 fills the cell and Alana allows herself to relax.  
For the moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick word about Bedelia's new condition  
> I do not by any design mean to say that those who are physically disabled or different in some way are made evil by their differences. In a way, Bedelia's physical degradation is a punishment for her vanity in believing that Hannibal should be hers, but this is a character-specific fate and judgement. Please do not think that by making our antagonist wheel-chair bound and unable to take care of herself completely that I am saying all those with physical disabilities and conditions are going to end up as villains. The elephant man was totally beautiful.  
> Nope.  
> Differences make up the human race. Colours, sexualities or lack thereof, nationalities and physical conditions, as well as mental. Takes all sorts to build up a crowd.  
> Bedelia's just a jerk that happens to be diasbled now. Ok, that was a very long note for a very long chapter. That is all. Have a Merry Christmas if you celebrate, and if not, then season's greetings and happy random Friday.


	16. The exhibition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sunburnt for Christmas. Got some good books. Christmas holidays is the time i read the most in the whole year

The night of the exhibition has arrived, and three of what you might call couples are preparing with varying levels of eagerness and preparedness.

 

“You really don’t have to-”

“I want to come, Hannibal.”

“I am not confident that you do.”

“Alright, let me re-phrase that. Shit, what is happening with this tie pin? I don’t even know if this piece has a function or if it’s decorative.”

Patiently, Hannibal brushes Will’s fumbling hands from the tie pin and fixes it on straight for him. “You were saying?”

“I was saying that I do want to come. For God’s sake, this is about a year of work for you. Why would I even consider missing the result of a year of your hard, devoted work? I know what happens when you pour your energy to making something spectacular. It would be a privilege to see, even if I wasn’t a little bit biased by the fact that it was my husband that put it together.”

Hannibal gives him a pleased smile, but remains modest “I had plenty of help.”

“Oh yeah? Not enough, in my books. So maybe I am afraid that if I show my face in that art gallery tonight then a SWAT team will crash through the ceiling and shut us up in different asylums within ten minutes, but we have already had so many talks about not letting anxiety stop us from living our lives successfully that I don’t know if I want to go through this again. It’d be like reading the script of a movie we’ve seen a thousand times over. I’m fine, Hannibal, I promise.”

Now that Will’s tie is fixed, he takes a moment to straighten the smallest wrinkle out of Hannibal’s.  
Once the task is complete, he folds his hands behind Hannibal’s neck and lets out the kind of sigh one would expect of a grandmother, attempting to rise from her favourite rocking chair on the porch.

He tugs Hannibal into an embrace. Over Hannibal’s shoulder, he can see the mirror, and in the mirror, Chiyoh is reflected. Lingering in the open door, in a fantastic dress Will still has no idea how she procured.   
He can smell her perfume. Either raspberries or a flower that smells very much like them.

Their plus-one. Well, Hannibal’s. Margot would be Will’s if she were not afraid of being recognised by some of the more successful and affluent artists (most of those she listed are artistes, Hannibal told him later) in attendance. The last thing Margot needs tonight is a reminder of where her spouse and child will be spending their evening, day, or whatever portion of the cycle of the planet they happen to be having wherever they are in the world.  
And a connection to the Murder Husbands as obvious as Margot Verger, in the middle of a gallery exhibition designed specifically to spite the serial killer that allegedly finished them off?

Not fucking likely.

Margot is camped out in Will’s shed, where the only TV on the estate lives. She is armed with a good deal of blankets, cushions, a quart of gourmet ice-cream and a few rom-coms she hasn’t seen since the lusty, wild days of her college years. That’s how she described those years, anyway, but Will suspects that even if she was an unabashed lesbian woman running rampant in a famously straight-laced conservative college, her courtships were all intimate and respectful. 

Chiyoh, on the other hand, offered no complaints when Hannibal extended an invitation to attend. Clearly, she was glad of the chance to finally follow Hannibal to work. Like Mary’s lamb, she would have trailed Hannibal all the way to work and back, and probably spent the time in between sleeping at his feet or menacing his business partners with a rifle.  
Had Hannibal not been very strict and transparent with his wishes that she, in Will’s interpretation, kept her ass on the estate and didn’t set foot off it without informing one of her three house-mates, Chiyoh would have quickly returned to being that loyal, slightly obsessive protector that Hannibal enjoyed the scrutiny of in Italy.

Will cannot make himself enjoy Chiyoh’s company.  
The only bright side he can even begin to conjure up about her accompanying them on a night he has been looking forward to for so long, to rule as a couple, is that if she didn’t, she would probably chew on the furniture. It is, after all, what the dogs do when they get nervous. Hannibal’s kitchen table still bears the scars of Acteon’s teeth from this time they left him to go grocery shopping without first patting him on the back and saying goodbye.

Will looks in on Margot before he goes.  
While Hannibal fires up the heater of his car and Chiyoh arranges the folds of her dress neatly in the back-seat, Will opens the door of the shed and slips inside quickly, to avoid letting the heat out.  
Will might refer to it as a shed, but in reality, the shed is a fully-furnished workshop, with both a heater and an air-conditioning installed. There are also stainless steel work surfaces and a wooden lattice for him to hang up his tools on, as well as an old, sagging arm-chair that Will has happily let go to seed with coffee stains and dog fur.

Margot is slouched in this chair in front of the fizzing TV. She has a dog on either side and a tub of ice-cream clutched in her arms like a treasure chest.  
When she looks at Will, the hilt of the spoon sticks out of her mouth like a strange kind of cigar.

“We’re going now.” says Will, rather redundantly.

Margot’s response is muffled by the spoon.

“What?”

“I said you look respectable.”

He glances down at himself, suddenly self-conscious under her gaze.  
‘Respectable’ is the word Victorian ladies used to refer to themselves while passing a burlesque hall, with their noses in the air. Or the term that the debutante of a Southern plantation would use to describe one of her numerous suitors. It makes him feel like an imposter, although this suit fits well and he has already had his husband assure him that he does not look like a total idiot.  
Numerous times.

“Ah.”

Margot cocks an eyebrow “Would you rather that I said ravishing, or dashing or something?”

Will taps the corner of his mouth “You’ve got chocolate right here.”

The dogs bid him a sleepy farewell. No matter how much they love him, they are not going to get up to greet him when that would mean leaving the folds of a warm huddle of blankets. All he gets are doggy grins with hooded eyes and a whine of protest from Girl when he shuts the door- no, she says, stay, I want your body warmth too.

He crunches through the snow and loosens his coat so as to wriggle out of it more easily once in the car. 

Hannibal’s got this look on his face that he tends to get before a particularly difficult murder. Something between quiet determination and a kind of muted, evil glee that Will has never seen another set of features come close to replicating.   
Hannibal has worked hard at something and all of that is going to come to fruition tonight. Their situation has been made far from ideal by the unexpected (half unwelcome) arrival of the two women, but that won’t get in the way of Hannibal’s triumph.

Tonight, this town will be eating out of the palm of his hand, along with all of the imported talent. 

Once they have left the darkened shape of their house in the rear-view mirror, Hannibal begins to share what is on his mind.

“Are you familiar with Samson Carter?”

“Carter Carter’s son?”

Hannibal nods “Mr Carter believes his son is a sociopath.”

Will shakes his head “Psychopath, if I ever saw one.”

“I am glad you agree with me.”

“Mr Carter wants you to treat his son?” guesses Will, his face already grim in anticipation.

“Yes. I am afraid that I cannot acquiesce, for reasons I am sure that you can list.”

Will starts to count them off on his fingers “Exposing us if you return to the psychiatric community, you like curating an art museum better than you like sympathising with manic depressives and co-dependents, if you hand out one personal favour like this then the whole town will rock up to our house with complaints of imagined OCD and childhood traumas,” he is then stopped by the sight of his wedding ring, noticing that it is slightly scuffed. Knowing Hannibal would not approve of Will using his jacket in such a way, Will surreptitiously slips the ring off and buffs it on the knee of his pants “They’re all good reasons.”

Chiyoh surprises Will by speaking up; he had almost forgotten she was in the back-seat “Don’t you think it’s strange that another, as you say, psychopath lives here?”

“No.” says Hannibal.

“Not really,” says Will “A third of the world-wide population suffers from depression. One percent of the world suffers from schizophrenia. About ten percent of the world wide population suffers from anxiety, and at least half of those with depression are going to have anxiety as well. There are plenty of warped mindsets out there in the world. It’s not that strange that we found another of them here.”

“I believe Mr Carter wanted me to tell him that his son killed that child they found underneath the bridge.”

Will frowns “Well I hope you didn’t tell him who it really was.”

Hannibal gives him an indulgent smile “That secret will accompany me to my grave, just as it did with the true murderer. I am impressed you remembered all those statistics, with your career in behavioural studies so far behind you.”

Shrugging, Will returns his ring to the proper finger. He wants to make some snide, playful remark about every day of his married life being a study of the behaviours of the criminally insane, but he will not do it. Not with Chiyoh in the back, poised to absorb every word that passes between them.  
He can only hope that she will mingle when they get to the exhibition, and put some distance between herself and her hosts.

 

Elsewhere, in a cramped bathroom and a spacious bedroom respectively, Tahcawin and Jack are putting the finishing touches on their looks for the night. 

Tossing chivalry to the wind, Jack scooted himself into the bathroom before Tahcawin could lay eyes on it and began to change. She had her make-up laid out on her nightstand, he reasoned, and she didn’t need the large bathroom mirror to do her mascara when she had a pocket-mirror.

Tahcawin has squeezed herself into a dress that smooths her slight paunch and pushes her small breasts up, inventing a cleavage she doesn’t have in any other clothes but this dress. The dress is a slinky black thing that reminds her of a tube sock. She bought it to wear on first dates, when she wants to make a good impression on cute guys from work, and a gorgeous woman, once, that she met through connections at work. It was that woman who told her that the dress made a panther of her- it made her sexy and fierce and undeniably powerful.   
Then, the woman stopped talking entirely for a few moments when Tahcawin admitted that she didn’t actually have breasts to speak of, and that she only wore the dress to create the impression that she did. She laughed for a long time and gave Tahcawin her number.

Tahcawin’s first girlfriend, whom she met while said girlfriend was still in university. They had be certain that they were going to be married happily ever after for a good while, until it became apparent that if the woman was going to have to choose between mistresses, then she was going to pick art. The schedules of a starving artist and a promising youngster, newly initiated into the FBI academy are by no means compatible.   
Their split was not amicable.

While Tahcawin fixes her hair into a neat bun and muses over lost loves, Jack is trying to remember how to do his tie up.

He never ever has this problem; this fumble-fingered, dazed struggle with a strip of cloth he has wound around his neck almost every day of his life since he started work, unless he is on his way to an event of some kind. Bella used to watch him as they prepared together. First with sympathy, then with bewilderment. It never ceased to amaze her how clumsy he became with a tie when he knew he was going to have to mingle and make merry- even at Hannibal’s table where he was comfortable. This back in the good ol’ days when Jack was unaware that whatever meat dish was placed on the doctor’s table was long pig, and not whatever flashy cut of meat he claimed it to be.

Bella would always come over and bat his hands away to fix the tie for him, after she was satisfied that he was not going to lick his nervous habit this time.  
She tended to tell the same high-school anecdote each time.

“When I was in high-school,” she would say as her hands worked deftly about the knot “I was invited to a party by a good friend. One of those friends that you’re only good friends with when your respective groups are away doing something else and she had gotten it into her head to invite me out with her group. The only problem was that all of her friends were white as snow. Me, I had a group of friends of all colours of the rainbow. I wasn’t used to being the only coloured person in a group, and the first night I went out with them, it made me so nervous that I was puking right up until the moment she knocked on my door. We had a good time. Her friends were colour-blind, I guess, just like her. She invited me out a lot after that, to go out with just those friends. Even though I knew it wasn’t gonna be trouble, every single fucking time I heard that white girl knocking on my door with all her white friends honking the horn in their car, I had to run back to the bathroom and vomit.”

When she had finished the tie, she would give it a firm tug, and, if in a playful mood, pretend it was a noose. By the time she had rescued Jack from his struggles, her make-up was usually done, her dress zipped and hanging at the right angles, and her hair was immaculate.   
She was always a snappy dresser, and quick about it too. When on long flights with business associates, she had a habit of taking frequent trips into the first-class bathroom to touch up her make-up, straighten her hair and freshen her deodorant to maintain that tight professional mask she wore everywhere but their home.

Jack had never known her to leave the house with a hair out of place. Even when the effects of her cancer had caught up with her and she lacked the energy to do most things, whenever she made herself leave the house, she went out looking neat and work-ready.

Jack misses her the most on nights like these. Nights where he is caught in front of a mirror, making his fingers work through the hopeless snarl of the tie at his throat and waiting for the burn of tears in his eyes. It has been so long since he cried for Bella. Every time he ends up in front of a mirror like this, he waits for her hand to appear on his shoulder in the reflection. He waits for his wife’s hands to reach around his shoulders and make short and deft work of his clumsiness.

And when none of that comes, and when the knot in his tie is straight and professional, Jack lingers in front of the mirror in the vain hope that he will allow himself to spill at least one tear.

He has been paralysed in front of the mirror like this for about a minute when Tahcawin knocks on the door.

“Not to rush you, sir, but are you almost ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“I wonder, sir, and I really am sorry to ask this, but could you help me find my other heel?”

Jack was terrified for a moment that she was going to ask him to help him zip up her dress.   
He is not afraid that she is going to try to seduce him- she’s far too professional for that, and she is probably completely unaware that Jack is even a male, in any romantic sense. But he has heard plenty of horror stories about the myriad of wardrobe malfunctions that only women have to contend with, from Beverly Katz and a few other female colleagues when out for drinks, and born witness to a few of Bella’s small crises. 

Looking for shoes was never something that he had to do for her, but he remembers a time that Beverly came to a function in shoes with heels of a differing length, and, noticing that Jack had noticed, had confided in him that she had knocked over her shoe closet and hadn’t had the time to sort things out. Whatever she grabbed first was what went on her feet.

Strange that Tahcawin seems to inspire in him a grief for both of the women he has lost most recently. His wife and his good friend. He wonders how often she has that effect on people. Wherever she takes her fresh-faced determination to do good in the world, she brings a painful nostalgia with her too.

She stands there, sheepish in a dress that fits well, but resembles a tube sock to Jack’s unromantic mind. Her feet are bare, and in one hand she holds a black lacquer shoe with a sensibly sized heel, the way that another woman might hold a dirty diaper or the corpse of a particularly large spider she has just killed.

The base of her throat flushes with shame “I’m afraid I’ve misplaced my shoe,” she nods to the chaos spilling out of her suitcase “As you can see, I’m not the neatest of packers.”

“May I see this?”

She hands it to him without complaint.

“Would you like to see an old trick?”

Tahcawin is both wary and curious, but she nods.

Jack gets down on his knees (hearing a few too many bones clicking in protest in his knees) and lifts the home-made bedspread. Winston raises his shaggy head from the floor, cocking one ear at a curious angle, the way he does when he hopes he’s going to get something to eat.

“Come here,” Jack pats the floor in front of him to beckon the dog “Come on out, Winston. Got a job for you.”

Obediently, the dog scoots forwards on his front legs and slithers out from under the bed. Jack kneels and shoes Winston the shoe. The dog sniffs it twice and understands what he’s being asked to do.  
Then he plants his bottom on the floor and looks to the side, avoiding Jack’s eyes.

“Winston, come on.” says Jack sternly “If I give you a treat every time you’ll do this you’re going to get fat.”

The dog does not comply, though.

Sighing, Jack puts the shoe on the floor in front of the dog and retrieves a sealed box of dog treats from his suitcase. At the sound of the food inside rattling, both of Winston’s ears shoot up and he hops to his feet, his tail wagging.

“Go on, find the shoe, boy. Find the shoe.”

With an expression that Jack can only compare to the look he saw on Price and Zeller once when he saw them getting handed Christmas bonuses, Winston goes to work. 

Tahcawin watches him sniff about the room with delight “Oh my gosh. How did you train him to do that?”

“It’s a bit of a morbid story, I’m afraid.”

“I’m all ears, sir.”

Jack sits on the edge of the bed while the dog works “I got a call once when I was home from the vet. Winston was with me and I was too far away from home to drop him off, then go answer the homicide call, so I ended up taking him to the scene of the crime with me. I made sure to keep him tight on the leash so he didn’t destroy the evidence. The officers at the scene were talking me through the murder and all the while there are searchers combing the woods in the background, looking for a second body that they had good reason to think was in the area.” 

He pauses for breath and gestures to Winston, whose nose is buried in Tahcawin’s clothes “This guy right here is getting excited by all of the attention that the officers are giving him. I’ve found that they tend to do that. Whenever something with unconditional love and friendliness to offer wanders up in the middle of a crime scene, everyone stops to coo and pet at it. I ended up getting close enough to a body that Winston had a chance to sniff it. The second he does, he sets off into the woods so fast that he rips his leash out of my hands.”

“Did he find the second body?” asks Tahcawin, her eyes shining with amusement.

“You bet he did. It was in the bottom of this 6 foot ravine in the forest floor that none of the searchers had looked over yet. While they were winching the body out, just about every officer on the scene came over to pet him on the head. He got so many muffin crumbs for that piece of work that it just spoiled him and inflated his ego. Now, he thinks it’s his job to track down corpses.”

“Do you take him on a lot of crime scenes with you?”

He wants to smile at her naivety “Only if the circumstances demand it. He isn’t really a police dog. He’s just an attention seeker with some skills and a good nose. Sometimes when I’m looking for something I misplaced, he turns up with it in his mouth. The catch is that I have to pay him with a dog treat whenever he does it, or he’ll go right back and hide what he just brought me.”

She laughs.  
For occasions like the one he has just described, Jack keeps a wedge of cheese in the refrigerator door. He has had to label it with a post-it note reading ‘DOG’S CHEESE’ so he doesn’t eat it in the confusion of one of his increasingly frequent late-night trips to the fridge.   
Winston is an utter cheese snob, and will only eat a certain kind of expensive brie. Also, he would be very mad at Jack if he caught him hunched over the wedge in the middle of the night, without Winston’s permission.  
Winston lifts his head from the suitcase in a triumph, and shakes a stray sock from his snout. He marches over to Jack with his tail held high and drops the shoe into Jack’s lap proudly. Jack hands over the treat and scratches his dog behind the ear absently. 

Just as Tahcawin has got her other shoe on, there is a knock at the door. Without waiting for them to confirm that they are ready, Sharon Johansson Snr pops her head around the door and smiles a smile marked out with a tasteful red lipstick. Her hair is in a hopelessly complicated bun that she must have had her husband do, otherwise her arms would have become dead with the effort of reaching around behind her head long enough to twist all of that hair into place.   
Tahcawin looks jealous when she notices that the officer is in a suit as oppose to a dress. She would probably be in one too, if she had thought to pack hers, and she couldn’t very well wear her work clothes to the gallery’s opening.

“You guys ready?”

“Sure.” says Tahcawin “We’re ready.”

“How about him,” she nods to Winston, whose rump is disappearing underneath the bed again “I can get Dion to let him out and check on him.”

“That would be good. He’s going to behave himself, I’m sure. Getting on in the years, aren’t you, Winston?”

The dog’s tail thumps indignantly under the bed. He does not approve of Jack’s ageist comment, nor his suggestion that the advanced age of seven and a half years old is going to stop him from tearing stuff up if he wants to.  
More than anything, Jack wishes he could cast off the jacket and the tie and nap under the bed with his dog. But, he is an adult, and despite his efforts, still a contributing member of the FBI community.

Jack casts one last wistful look at the tip of Winston’s tail, protruding from underneath the bedspread, before he closes the door quietly and follows the two women to the car.

 

In her perhaps-not-that-longer-maiden aunt’s house, Mercy Water is having a helluva time getting her bust into the dress she has selected for the night.  
Mercy does not subscribe to the train of thought that the women in fine society who dress to impress are dressing to impress the men. As she watches her figure ooze out of this hole and that zipper, she cannot wipe the grin from her face. This body is one that she works hard to maintain- one that she was lucky to get, from a long genetic history of busty, wide-hipped women on her father’s side. If she could have inherited the history of wasp-waists from her mother’s side, then she probably would have gone into the modelling business in university, when she was a starving art student.

But like her now successful career, Mercy has had to fight to maintain this body, and she does not mind so much that petty people will be exchanging whispers behind her back if she chooses to display it. She dresses to enjoy the way she looks personally, not to invite others to stare.

The problem is getting this dress actually done up. At the front is a complicated tangle of cords that is supposed to lace up to form a bodice. So far, all Mercy has succeeded in doing is knotting the cords hopelessly, and once, in a furious effort to cram them in, popping a single boob entirely out of the bodice/corset/medieval torture device.   
It has become apparent that she is going to need some help.

She calls into the next room “You were a girl scout, right?”

“Right!” comes the answer from the bathroom.

“Did they still do badges in knots when you were coming up? Because this dress is fucking me over.”

The toilet flushes, the sink gushes, and a moment later Freddie Lounds comes in, still tugging her pencil skirt into place. She takes one look at the mess across Mercy’s expansive breast and breaks into peals of laughter.  
Her hands on her hips, Mercy waits patiently for her friend to finish mocking her, then gestures to her chest.

“Help a lady out here.”

“I haven’t seen this dress since Halloween, when you went as a zombie bride.”

“Well don’t go telling the others that. As far as they can tell, this is a designer piece.”

Freddie cocks an eyebrow “Now I know you can afford those, these days, so what’s your plot? You trying to pull a man? A lucky woman?”

Mercy purses her lips “I think my experiments with the opposite sex are over. There might be a man. You never know.”

“So you don’t have your eye on anyone? This is a just in case dress?”

Mercy smiles at the phrase. Freddie coined in during the days when they were college roomies- Freddie, a creative writing major which somehow launched her into the world of seedy tabloid journalism, and Mercy, a visual arts major that somehow made it successfully in the art world before hitting her thirties.  
Were you to compare the determined, serious girls they once were to the successful women, preparing to own the night ahead of them, there would be little to distinguish them. Except, perhaps, the size of their wallets.

And Freddie has one limb less than she did in her college days. Like most of the confident, Freddie makes whatever she has on look good. Her prosthetic arm is uncloaked in the flesh-coloured gloves she will sometimes pull on, when she is in no mood for questioning glances, or muted exclaims of shock or disgust from cashiers when they realise the hand they have just accepted money from is made of carbon fibre rather than skin and bone.  
The arm looks rather like a fine art piece, perhaps taken from one of those steampunk fantasy worlds that are popular with the kids today. The joints do not move seamlessly or organically, but the movements are instead made to seem like the carefully orchestrated sequences of a slow and deliberate ballet.

Mercy has always admired Freddie’s blunt air of grace. As ‘girly’ as Mercy can sometimes claim to be, she has no patience for women who have not taken the time to learn how to carry and present themselves. She believes it is a responsibility of a woman to know how to walk in a man’s world, lest she be sucked up in the patriarchy and become trapped under that blasted glass dome.

While her mind is on the subject of men, and while Freddie is too concentrated on persuading her bust into the corset, Mercy allows her mind to wander back to her discussion with the curator of the museum where her art is about to be unveiled. 

Perhaps she is wearing the dress for him. Dr Faust is a married man- married to another man, in fact, but sometimes people can be persuaded to join a different team for a time. She herself was during college. After growing up determined to stay true to her romantic proclivities, seeing a close friend struggle with their own homosexuality, Mercy promised herself that she would not experiment.  
She already knew she was straight. The way she saw it, forcing herself to try something with a woman would be no better than the friends of her parents trying to force him to dump his boyfriend and take up a girlfriend.

Then the damned cop came on the scene and she was smitten before she knew it. For two years, she was smitten, and all at once it stopped. She is still not sure if it was truly their schedules which ended their relationship, or Mercy’s own underlying convictions that she was not being true to herself, dating and loving a woman.  
Since the cop, she has had no one in her bed but men. Older men, usually, because young and firm flesh reminds her a little too much of her first and last girlfriend. 

Dr Faust cannot be far past his fifties, if he has reached them at all, and his husband must be a handful of years younger at least. They look to Mercy like a couple that courted for a long time before they became a couple.   
The fondness with which they treat each other is a practiced and comfortable one, and it is plain to anyone who looks that they know each other quite well. Maybe, in Mercy’s active imagination, a little better than they would prefer. Because of her own relative romantic failure ever since the cop left her bed, Mercy is always looking for flaws in other people’s relationships.

If there is a large enough crack in the façade, than she wriggles in, if she can, and splits up the couple, if she is feeling cruel or sad enough to do so. It would have earned her a terrible reputation in her circles if it weren’t for the humiliation factor of the men she tricked out of wives and girlfriends- they hold their tongues, and hope that their significant other will let them in when they come crawling back.

Mercy doubts that she will be able to split up the two of them. And she also does not really want to. Rather, she would just like to watch them. To be close to their obvious love for each other and to pretend that she has something like it in her own life.  
Freddie has her Fereydoon. Mercy has never met the man in real life, but she knows that Freddie is going to marry him, if Freddie is going to marry anyone. The way she talks about him, in letters and over the phone alike, has made that clear enough to Mercy- though maybe Freddie is not yet aware of it.

She is jealous and she is lonely. A dangerous combination that she unintentionally included in her work. Francis Dolarhyde has been cast down; he has not fallen, but he has been rejected by a party from which he sought acceptance and affection. He tried to give himself over to the Great Red Dragon and other entities of pure power and violence like it, and was soundly rebuffed.

Mercy can identify, which was a little bit scary to realise in the process of painting the work. 

“You’re ready.” announces Freddie.

“I’m ready?” repeats Mercy, glancing down at the perfectly laced corset “So I am. Thanks, Fred.”

“Sure, Merc.”

The women make the last few adjustments- chasing down shoes, touching up make up and tucking away a few stray strands of hair. Mercy runs through a quick list of the fine art elite that she intends to introduce Freddie to for her piece, and Freddie listens diligently, occasionally asking after the works they have done so she does not appear totally ignorant. Freddie is essentially sneaking into the event under the guise of Mercy’s plus-one, so they are going to have to be very careful.

As they prepare, despite her misgivings and internal fear-mongering, Mercy can’t help but feel genuinely excited for the first time in a long time.   
Whatever happens, the night is sure to be a phenomenal event. One that she and Freddie will look back on for the rest of their lives.


	17. The adjustment period

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We get one of those pointless flash-backs before launching into the big night. Raising the tension, or jack-assery by the author?   
> I leave it up to you, my dear readership, to decide for yourselves.

(several years earlier)

Couples are always learning things about each other. No matter how well the partners, or whatever the number included in the relationship might be, claim to know each other; no matter how often they finish each other’s sentences and laugh at the same jokes in the movies, there is always something that goes unaddressed for a long time. Humans are social creatures for the most part. One will always desire a pack and a mate, or two, depending on the circumstances.

While the human style of interaction is very much a public and social process, the internal dialogue is just that: internalised. The average human mind processes far too much information a day to share everything with their partner or partners, or whatever significant other it is that might claim to know everything about them.

The same can be said for couples whose business was to know each other, before they gave into various pressures and released various prejudices to come together as a couple.   
A great deal of Hannibal’s power over Will had to do with the fact that he was able to predict Will and his actions with a startling accuracy. But, like the astronomers of old, he could only watch and make guesses, based on previous experience. Will was still an alien, heavenly body drifting through the reaches of an ether that Hannibal ad no hope of following him into.

And as for Hannibal? Well, Will was petrified of the idea that he alone in the world could understand the fantastic madman that had taken an interest in him, and so refused to have anything to do with said madman for a long time. In refusing to know him, he came to know him all the better. At some point during the three year sabbatical Hannibal’s interment forced them to take from each other’s affections, Will achieved that level of ‘knowing’ that your average couple or triad or platonic soulmates are desperate to claim over each other. 

He knew him better than Hannibal knew himself, or something. Whatever tired romantic cliché is employed to describe the experience. 

It is only in these last nine months of travel that they have really begun to acknowledge that they know each other so well. And even so, they still do not understand everything about each other. 

Case in point: what is wrong with Will right now?

They are in the neat, cramped carriage of an over-night train, bound for Italy. Perhaps the same train that Will was tossed from a few years ago, in the process of reuniting with Hannibal in that same country. He did remark on the similar appearance of the train, though, rather than hypothesising the first and this train to be the same, he just wondered aloud if the appearance was standardised across the company that the trains belonged to.  
When Will noticed this similarity, Hannibal grew concerned. Memories of bad times gone by tends to be a powerful trigger for one of Will’s dark moods.

He has not succumbed to one of those dark moods in almost an entire month, which is why Hannibal was against this mode of transport in the first place. What if it reminded him so much of his and Chiyoh’s trip that it sent him in another brief, but painful, downwards spiral?   
As it turns out, he was right.

Now that Will is stretched out in the small bunk they share (they came under the pretence of being just friends, for fear that it would attract some unwanted interference in this part of the world if two men were to attempt to share a single, narrow bunk), Hannibal does not know what to do with his bitter victory.

How can he coax him away from the bad memories when they are literally travelling in one?

Hannibal does not have long to think on this. For a while, he is content to sit off to the side, in a small chair provided for their convenience, by the small window, and hope that he will think of something suitable to say, if only to break the heavy silence.

“I want a dog.”

Starting a little in surprise, he looks over at his partner “Right now?”

Will shakes his head “Not until we have a yard to put it in.”

He has known this discussion was coming for a long time “What kind of breed do you suppose we would have?”

He shrugs “I don’t know if I ever thought about breeds when I was taking them in. If the dog liked me, then I liked it back and it came home with me. That’s all the judgement that went into my adoptions.”

Hannibal nods “Your dogs were a wild assortment of mutts, weren’t they?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what Winston was, but I guess I’d like a dog that looks a little bit like he looked.”

Will still thinks about Winston a lot. Though he claims that he had no favourites, it is pretty obvious to Hannibal that Winston was his favourite, however unacknowledged his status may have been. Because Jack is already well aware that his rogue agent and escaped cannibal are not dead, and not just because of the body of the poor woman whose neck Will had no choice but to snap, Hannibal saw no reason not to check in on the dog. So what if it revealed that they were alive in some way? Jack was already certain of that.

He did not tell Will of his intentions and is still waiting for the right moment to inform him of what he did, but he can rest a little easier, for his partner’s sake, knowing that Winston has found a caring new home.  
He called Jack from a cheap cell phone in India, procured especially for the occasion.

Jack answered, his voice thick with sleep and confusion. It was something like midnight in his time-zone when Hannibal chose to call, so he did not guess at all who was on the other end.

“Yeah?” rumbled the man “Who is this?”

There was a small script planned inside Hannibal’s head. As it turned out, he did not need it at all to find out where Winston was. No sooner than Jack had spoken, did he grumble at someone in the room with him.

Hannibal distinctly heard “No kisses, Winston.”

And that was all he needed. Hanging up, he snapped the phone in half and threw it in a nearby dumpster, then went about his business.  
He found it highly doubtful that Jack would allow Winston to crawl all the way into his bed if Jack did not have the sincere aim of providing a new home for the dog. After all, they did know each other. Each time they met each other, there was an unguarded affection on each end. Hannibal was not at all surprised by where Winston had ended up. In fact, the more he considered the arrangement, the more satisfied he felt with it. 

Like his former master, Winston was a stray, and it would seem that he became too accustomed to a life made safe by routine and a guarantee of shelter to return to the streets after he lost his master, and the house with it. It would seem that Will is of the same character.  
He did, after all, find a new life to creep into once his with Hannibal had been put to an end by Hannibal’s capture. 

“Do you have a country in mind?”

“You don’t have to indulge me.”

“Indulge you? What do you mean?”

“I mean…you don’t have to talk about the future like you actually want what I want. I know we’re kind of on different pages about that.”

He blinks “Are we?”

Will looks a little embarrassed to have started in on the sensitive topic “Uh, I was under that impression, at least. You need a little bit of the wind in your hair after being confined to the same room for three years.”

Nine months of travelling have done enough to relieve Hannibal of the cabin fever. While it is true that he is not quite ready to return to living a normal and structured life, it is also true that Hannibal would not mind accelerating the process of doing so, now that he is sure he’s going to have someone to share that routine with.  
He has not yet expressed this sentiment to Will. Mostly because when doing so, he plans to include a proposal of marriage as well. They have known each other for almost four and a half years by now. In his days in the high society of Boston, he knew a few very happy couples who had gotten married after under a year of courtship. If those couples were satisfied after a few months of dating, then he sees no reason that Will should refuse him, after four years of courtship.

But he is still nervous. Of course he is still nervous. He has already been ‘married’ once and did not enjoy a second of the experience, except perhaps their symbolic divorce, when he cooked Bedelia’s leg and then a wonderful handful of hours watching her slowly die of an insidious cocktail of poisons meant to end him.   
Will already has a ring, but he put that on himself. He just took a fancy to the ring in a market in the Middle East and did not think about which finger he put it on, when he put it on. 

Now, Hannibal looks at the ring on Will’s left ring finger and can only see an invitation. Again, he is stopped by the feeling that he must wait for the right moment.  
He has the impression that Will is going to find out about Winston being with Jack and get properly engaged on the same day.

He needs to tell Will something to allay his fears.  
“Whenever I looked to the future, I saw myself in a small American town. Never a European city. I do enjoy visiting Rome and Paris and their contemporaries inordinately, but to be surrounded by ancient wisdom and beauty every hour of the day detracts from the appreciation of such things. Too much of rich things makes anyone sick.”

This seems to lift Will’s spirits a little bit. He turns onto his side to face Hannibal “I’ve never heard you say something like that about good food.”

“Even I cannot stomach a gourmet dish every night.”

Will knows this by now. In their near-year of travel, he has discovered that even Hannibal will sometimes take the lazy route out and make a bowl of popcorn for dinner. The first time he saw Hannibal slap a piece of lunchmeat (shorn from the thigh of a particularly well-read maid in a hotel, who figured out who her guests were before they could leave), he had an explosive fit of laughter and had to sit down until it abated.  
He meant no offense. He compared his reaction to that of a worshipper in a temple, catching their patron god in the act of picking their nose. 

Suddenly, in a flash of painful realisation, Hannibal guesses that Will might be concerned that he is talking about him as well. Hearing that even Hannibal grows tired of the best life has to offer- Will might take that as a threat on his safety. Even at this advanced stage in their relationship, and in his acquaintanceship with this new, murderous Will, Hannibal cannot say for sure which one it might be.

“I hope you never get tired of companions.”

Shit.

Hannibal thinks fast “Companions, yes, but I cannot say that I tire of partners very easily. In fact, I would imagine that I will never tire of your company, since I have never had someone in my life that I would refer to as a ‘partner’ before, and I’m well into my forties.”

Will laughs “You’re not that old.”

“I am not so young, either. I certainly feel too old for dating.”

He laughs again. Probably at the idea that Hannibal ever participated in anything as mundanely human as dating.

“Me too.” says Will, opening his arms “Come over here. I’m a little cold.”

Hannibal makes sure the door is soundly locked before he joins him.


	18. The night begins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ever had one of those moments where you hit the wrong key and expect to see that damned squiggle under your word to tell you it's all wrong? And instead of that, it's accepted? And you go: 'is that even a word'  
> Does anyone know what the hell a 'seel' is? I'm hoping it's not a swear or a slur, but Microsoft Word seems to think it's an acceptable word.

Even when observed from the darkness of the sidewalks, the night promises to be one of style and class and brutal wit. 

Golden lights spill from every pore of the art museum. The crust of the town are there, which amounts to a handful of old white women and the various gardeners and plumbers they have taken on as lovers, as well as a few couples who have settled to get away from the world and a few other younger artists trying to start small.   
Those from the town who have gotten in via some nepotic channel or for holding some importance in the town are also dressed up, as nice as they have been for years. 

Suits that last saw the light of day at a niece’s wedding or a job interview have been retrieved from the depths of closets for a hasty dry-clean. Dresses that haven’t fit since that one hot night in Las Vegas, or since their owners opted for a career change that didn’t require having slinky, low-cut dresses in waiting have been taken out, often altered to accommodate expanded girths, and worn with the pride. 

Along with them, the imported talent are climbing the steps. They are easily identified from the townspeople, by their bohemian, sometimes sophisticated, sometimes lazy looks.

In the art community, when a variety of artists gather and collect, united over a common goal rather than an element of style or the love of a single artist, the effect is both terrifying and fantastic. When collected together, climbing the stairs and gathering in the lobby of the art gallery, they look like one of Matisse’s collages. Perhaps one Matisse did on a violent acid high, though, to have imagined some of the outfits of the more bohemian artists. These outfits were probably conceived on a questionable substance of a similar, if not identical nature.

Among the first wave to arrive are Mercy Waters and Freddie Lounds. Freddie has come in the disguise of an artist with fierce feminist tendencies- the ones who sketched men in the traditionally female poses, swooning, a breast exposed, in the arms of a strapping woman in high-school at the back of notebooks, or when they are feeling less scathing, sensitive and well-designed ink-washes that communicate something profound about the inherently sexist nature of most societies.

Which is to say, she’s got on an impeccable black suit and a face carefully calculated to be sour. She does not look pleased to be there, but manages to give the impression that she is not pleased to be there owing to having to interact with other human beings without a canvas to screen her. At the same time, she looks thrilled to be in the presence of so much talent.

Essentially, this is because Freddie really is very excited. On the way over, Mercy, dressed to the nines and practically bouncing with anticipation filled her ears with stories of this artist and that artist and how amazing their technique is, had to grin with amusement as her own excitement rubbed off on Freddie. Freddie is not really one for art when it does not involve a good story to tell and sell, despite her attendance at the liberal ‘arts’ college where she and Mercy first met, but she feels like she might have to get into it after this night.

Mercy, on the other hand, has been ready to spring out of her expensive heels in excitement. Her work is one of her best pieces.   
She is going to be giving a scintillating speech about art and all that stuff, which was even checked over by the curator and organiser of the whole event (who was no harder to look at than some of the best pieces in the exhibition, she thinks, privately) and given a stellar review. And on top of that, she just knows that people will be asking about her dress all night.  
It’s daring. It’s bold. It’s incredibly rare, and she will not by lying when she says it’s a one of a kind original, because the dress was made as a piece for a fashion designing course that a friend of hers and Freddie was taking, and given to Mercy after the final exams when they decided that it would look far better on her curves than behind some display glass.

She grips Freddie’s arm in an ecstasy of excitement “I may pee myself.” She whispers.

“Please don’t.” responds Freddie under her breath “Now, tell me, who is who around here? Who’s that guy, for example?”

“Oh, that’s a friend of mine. Carter!”

Carter Carter turns around and smiles. But his smile is weak, and Mercy sees why as she spots the barrel-shaped figure of his son, packed into a handsome suit beside him. The father is wearing comfortable slacks and a sweater he has obviously worn around his studio, but had his son wear something that looks like it was bought for a prom just for formality’s sake.  
Mercy has met Samson Carter before, and understands his father’s anxiousness that his son makes a good first impression. After the first meeting with the boy, there’s not much to think about, apart from the bitter and strange after-taste it leaves in your mouth, and the sensation of narrowly missing being struck by a car.

“This is Carter Carter and his son, Samson.” says Mercy easily, concealing her discomfort at again having to be around the strange son “Carter’s piece is really stupendous. I’ve got to show it to you, first thing.” then, addressing only the Carters “This is Ivan Nasar, a good friend of mine from college.”

Freddie manages to conceal a smirk in a false smile and shakes hands with Carter. When she extends her hand to Samson, Samson looks blankly at the hand, and then only touches it for the briefest of moments. It is like Freddie has dipped her hand in cool water. Immediately, she is intrigued.   
She is going to have to check in on this kid later and see if she can catch him muttering dark things under his breath, or pocketing a knife from the dinner course.

As they climb the steps with the rest of the still thin crowd, with the abashed curiosity of a man who tries his hardest to be progressive but often finds himself and his small-town experiences to be too limited to allow him to be as progressive as he would like, Carter remarks “Ivan Nasar…that’s an unusual name.”

Again, Freddie sets to work on concealing her smirk “Yes. Ivan was my abuelita’s name and Nasar is my husband’s surname.”

Flushing slightly, Carter nods. Marriage, Mercy can see him thinking, of course she married into that name- everybody marries everyone these days!

In truth, Ivan is the first name of the character from one of their shared favourite novellas: ‘One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’.  
The surname Nasar was lifted from a character from one of Freddie’s personal favourites; ‘Chronicle of a death foretold’. Mercy distinctly remembers her being enchanted by the way a journalistic tone of voice and a more conventional story-telling narrative were flawlessly meshed. It might even have been that book that finally pushed Freddie to pick journalism, when she was torn between creative writing and the former.   
So, now when Mercy uses her contacts to execute some kind of unsavoury favour for Freddie, they use that alias. The name is so far out there it’s not even a struggle for Mercy to remember what she must call Freddie, when someone asks after her later on.

Thank goodness that Carter has at least had the good sense not to ask about the prosthetic, now glimmering in the soft, but pragmatically bright lighting of the gallery.

They are quickly separated from the Caters. Upon arriving in the shinning lobby, Mercy immediately spies someone more interesting and makes her excuses, promising that she will see Carter later and telling Samson to enjoy himself.  
On her way to accost the more interesting person she has seen, she bumps into a large, solidly-built man. She bounces unharmed off his shoulder, and apologises distractedly. Freddie does not spare the man a sideways glances as she pursues Mercy into the thickening crowd.

And Jack, for his part, barely notices that he was knocked into at all, and does not have the time to utter the first syllable of an apology before his attacker has disappeared.

“What?” asks Tahcawin.

“Nothing. Just bumped someone.”

Tahcawin shivers involuntarily. This is about the fifth time she has done that since they walked into the gallery. Jack has been counting and has promised himself that if she does it twenty times, he can have a shot of the expensive ‘emergency whiskey’ in his suitcase before bed.  
He may not need the shot by the time he gets to bed. Surviving this night of so far, self-satisfied and priggish artists may mean steadily pickling himself in drink. It will not reflect very well on him if Tahcawin and Sharon Johannsson have to drag him back home and turn him on his side to prevent him from drowning in his own vomit, but at least he knows they are reliable, and are unlikely to attempt to take advantage of him in his weakened state.

God, when was the last time he was even concerned about getting home from a party? Bella didn’t like alcohol very much. She was never drunk unless she was exceedingly upset by something, so was the designated driver by default.   
He can count the number of times she has had to man-handle him into the house and put him to bed in his clothes on one hand. Jack has never been much of a drinker himself.

“Oh, it’s the Sherriff!” Sharon points a little ahead of them and then makes a bee-line for her employer.

Jack starts to look around for a drinks table, or, more likely, at a party of this calibre, a waiter ferrying about nips and fingers to keep the guests entertaining.

As he can see no way out of it, Jack trails behind Sharon, and Tahcawin strides behind him, drawing appreciative and jealous looks as she goes.   
Sherriff Dun’s eyes widen in surprise when they land on her in particular. He mumbles a greeting to Sharon’s chirpier hello, and gives Tahcawin an appraising look. Jack shifts in front of her, hoping to block most of her curves from Sherriff Dun’s wandering eyes with his own girth.

“Hello again, Mr Crawford.” says Santi, looking more than slightly miserable. Sharon has already found the time to ask him how he feels after his latest asthma attack “Ms Walker.”

Tahcawin is surprised to see him there “Are you one of the artists?”

His eyes go wide in a comical expression of shock “Me? God, no, no! I’m useless at art. I couldn’t draw if my life depended on it. No, I’m only good for engineering-”

“Rocket science.” adds Sherriff Dun with undisguised pride.

Santi ignores his grandfather’s addition “You met my boyfriend, right?”

“Tyrone Collins.”

“His mother did a piece for this exhibition, so I came along to look at it.” he looks at his grandfather out of the corner of his eye, nervous “And, um, to keep Abuelo company.”

Ah.  
So the good Sherriff isn’t exactly happy with his grandson’s current life-partner. That is going to make for an awkward night, if Jack and Tahcawin get roped into a little group with them for the night. If that happens, Jack may just have to knock over one of those convenient waiters with the little drinks and steal the whole payload. 

Santi scoots backwards, ready to bound away “In fact, I’m gonna go find him now.”

“What for? You see him every day. Why don’t you let him out of your sight for a moment? Keep me company, like you said.”

The poor kid squirms under the pressure of the stares. Sharon makes the situation infinitely worse by giving out with what she must think is a polite little cough, and averting her eyes conspicuously.

The moment is saved by the arrival of a woman in a breath-taking red ensemble. Her head is covered with a beaded headscarf, and a set of slim arms are encased in red fabric all the way up to the wrists. She shows barely an inch of skin and, as Jack glances around the room to see if anyone else is having a similarly ‘wow’ reaction to his, he notes that she is still pulling in just as many stunned looks as Tahcawin in her little tube-sock.

She smiles at Sharon “Sharon! Dion couldn’t make it, then?” her accent is the most British thing Jack has ever heard “That’s a bloody shame. I so wanted him to see the gallery! Our Dr Faust has just done the most marvellous job, hasn’t he?”

Sharon nods “Noor, these are agents Crawford and Walker.”

The woman, Noor, smiles a dazzling smile “Really? I mistook you for some of the imported talent.”

Jack catches a glimpse of a man going by in nothing but a fringed leather jacket and a pair of speedos the size of a handkerchief over her shoulder, and hopes he does not have to hear that again tonight “Really, ma’am, we are the agents.”

Her expression grows solemn suddenly “You really must do something about this bloody cult, agents. For a long time there was some talk about cancelling this entire thing- we were so afraid that the cult is going to try to retaliate because of this show, but it was simply just too big and too important to cancel. People are here from all over the world. I mean, literally, all over the world,” she beckons to them, drawing them into a kind of team huddle, and points towards a few members of the crowd “Kowloon, Amsterdam, Arecibo, Maastricht and I think…what’s that big city in Australia with all of the things on the river?” 

“Sydney?” suggests Sharon.

“Brisbane! Brisbane, that’s the one. You know, it takes about fourteen hours to get from Brisbane to here? And that’s not counting two lay-overs. I don’t know how that poor man over there is still alive, or even how he has the energy to keep going after the jet lag he must be feeling.”

The man from Brisbane is named Steven Lee, and he has contributed a large water-colour in which the Great Red Dragon is depicted as rising from a pool of blood about the prone body of Francis Dolarhyde.   
Steven Lee is sixty years old. With him, he has brought a tall, plain girl with an abundance of freckles he introduced as his niece from Charleston, North Carolina. The niece has stars in her eyes. She has obviously never been to an event of this formality or style before, so to steel her nerves and survive the experience, she has gathered a small stash of snacks in the right pocket of the jacket she carries over one arm. Every now and then, when she believes no one is looking, she will plunge a hand into the pocket, retrieve a morsel, and stuff it in, under the pretence of covering her mouth with her hand to cough.

Her name is America.

“America,” says Steven Lee “This is Dr Faust, the man who worked to get this all together.”

America swallows quickly and dusts a few stray crumbs of brie from her high collar “Hello Dr Faust. This is a very nice show you put together.”

“Thank you.” says Hannibal.

“How many artists contributed?” she asks with some genuine curiosity “I saw the gallery earlier. Looks like a lot.”

“Around fifty, I believe.”

An eyebrow shoots up “Wow. That must have been really hard to keep them all happy.”

Steven takes a generous sip from his glass of chardonnay “You know, we were very pleasantly surprised by the generosity of the people around here. It is really quite amazing the way the community rallied around together when the hotel was flooded.”

“Is it really frozen?” asks the niece.

“Yes, really.” says Will.

He passed it the other day on his way to work and got a good, long look at the destruction wrought by Marlene Maleny’s stray arrow. The way he heard it, she for some reason thought it was a good idea to hone her archery skills in the boiler room. When the leak sprung, it sprung forth with the ferocity of a geyser and had the toilets and sinks over-flowing too.   
By the time Mrs Maleny had come back from the basement to get a mop and start some damage control, her husband and daughter and the cleaning staff had taken refuge on the check-in desk.

The water froze over on the first level before it could be pumped out, with a few additional, smaller puddles of ice sitting on the third and fourth and fifth floors of the hotel.

It is moments like that moment he had to think about Marlene Maleny in front of her frozen hotel that make him glad he and Hannibal are not going to have children. What if the vital piece of hotel property she damaged had been her father?  
What if she had hit him and gotten his frozen blood all over the place? He might have earned that death, actually. Such ironies surely await any parent who lets their children practice archery indoors.

“How is your host family?” asks Hannibal “I understand you are staying with the Wallender-Kellys?”

America coughs and stuffs a corner of a sweet bread she does not know the name of into her mouth before saying “They’re wonderful. The mother of the family is a police officer, you know. She really wanted to come to this thing, but she had to go on patrol. The entire police department is out patrolling the streets, if they haven’t been assigned to houses or shops to protect. There’s a lot of them here, too, right?”

“Of course.”

Steven seems to become a little nervous, stepping closer to his niece “Of course, we won’t have anything to worry about.”

“Of course not.” echoes Hannibal.

At this point, America can contain her curiosity no longer. The majority of her childhood has taken place in a capitol of the Deep South, and because of the predominant political agendas of such areas, she is astounded to see two men wearing wedding rings. As liberal a city as Charleston manages to be when compared to the rest of the South, she still had plenty of reason to believe that gay, married couples only existed in movies and TV and a few books.

“How long have you two been married?” she bursts out.

Will would offer an indulgent smile, if he felt like smiling at her. He finds her just the tiniest bit repulsive. It is no fault of America’s alone. At the moment, he finds everyone in the room a tiny bit repulsive. Save his husband, of course.  
Hannibal is the designated safe-zone of the night, and Will does not know if he can bring himself to let go of his arm or stray from his side for more than five minutes at a time.

“We’ve been together seven years,” he says automatically “But married for…oh, almost four now. Scratch that, we’ve been together for almost eight years.”

“Did you get married in a church?”

Steven is mortified, but does not know how to stop his niece without calling her out on the accidental homophobia, or perhaps cracking her on the back of the head with his half-empty glass.

“No, we didn’t. We saw no reason to make a fuss.” answers Hannibal evenly “You may understand when you are older- the desire for some peace and quiet. It is no easy task to find the person with whom you could actually picture yourself sharing your life with. Once you do, it is sometimes just easier to dispense with the grandeur.”

In his head, Will is applauding. That is the most generous answer he has ever heard Hannibal give someone in response to a question about their marriage. Usually, he just flashes a smug, reptilian smile and says something about registry offices being quicker and cheaper.  
He has taken Will’s hand and spins the ring on it absently, with his forefinger. He does this a lot, when discussing their marriage with friends or strangers. Kind of reminds Will of the way a dog will grab up its favourite toy and run away with it, so as not to share it with any visiting dogs.

Will wonders what his dogs are doing right now.  
He hopes Margot hasn’t fed them too much ice cream. Actaeon puts on weight so easily. When he gets fat, he looks like somebody’s maiden aunt crashing in front of her favourite day-time soaps. 

Will is dragged back from his small session of spacing out when his eyes meet America’s, rather unexpectedly. While the other two talk about the ritualistic nature of modern marriage ceremonies and debate as to whether or not it is even a worthwhile use of finances anymore, America and Will commiserate in silence. Both of them are out of their depth and uncomfortable.

America; because she is a young teenage girl, feeling her the political ignorance that a childhood in the South often unfortunately entails.  
Will; because he is a man in his forties who wants to be at home in bed, and who hates himself a little bit for not being able to enjoy what his bed fellow put gallons of sweat, tears and blood (and not all of it his) to perfect.

Were they closer in age, America might feel confident enough to offer him a piece of the strip of prosciutto ham she pulls from her pocket. But they are not, so Will pretends he hasn’t seen anything. When he looks away, he unfortunately catches the eye of someone he knows.

Sort of knows.  
Mercy Waters knows Hannibal. When you know someone, you for some reason automatically know their spouse as well.

The moment she sees Will looking at her, she starts coming towards him.  
Will’s stomach sinks. He hears the ‘Jaws’ theme playing in the back of his head. He considers faking a fainting spell.  
Anything to avoid social contact.

“Dr Faust and Professor Columbus! I was looking all over for you two.”

Pasting on his best attempt at an inviting smile, which results in a half-smile, Will cups his palm about the crook of Hannibal’s elbow and presses himself to his side. In every way he knows, he is begging his husband to save him.   
But Hannibal can’t. He’s got to be a host and therefore, a functioning human being as much as he can.

Will just has to tough it out tonight.

Once Mercy has introduced herself to the Lees and gushed the appropriate amount over Steven’s piece, she starts on what Will guesses is going to be the hot topic of the night.

“So, what do you think about the Dolarhyde case?”

At least they’re calling it the ‘Dolarhyde case’, now. For about a year, they referred to the case as ‘the end of the Murder Husbands’, thanks to Freddie Lounds’ intrepid journalism.

“It was awful.” says America timidly “All those people died. All those children. It’s almost as bad as what’s going on here.”

“The man was obviously a lunatic.” adds her uncle “I don’t know whether to curse Lecter or praise him for finishing the bastard off. Still, it was an interesting case of dysphoria, wasn’t it? The man’s mental illnesses must have been as numerous as his victims, but the reason he chose to murder- it was just strange, wasn’t it? Thinking he was the dragon! How does one become so fixated on a character or an art piece that their identity becomes warped around it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Mercy, fanning herself a hand, the nails of which have been impeccably painted alternating black and white “But of all of the paintings he could have picked, I wonder why he selected the Great Red Dragon? Mark, you’re a behavioural scientist, aren’t you? What do you think?”

“A serious delusion. He was in contact with Hannibal Lecter at the time, so I imagine the man did nothing to discourage his delusion. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Lecter that encouraged Dolarhyde to take his delusions to the next level by eating the painting.”

A smile curves the corner of Hannibal’s mouth “I believe you give the man too much credit, dear. Dolarhyde must have been lost to his delusion for many years before he decided to take inspiration from the Shrike.”

“Perhaps. But the Shrike’s involvement accelerated the process of losing touch with reality by miles.”

Mercy lets out a little, warbling laugh “Do you two always talk like this?”

“There are certain issues one must contend with when marrying another intellectual.” says Hannibal, with the air of a man admitting a delicious secret.

“Oh, America, on that note, you must let me introduce you to another charming pair of intellectuals. I was just asking Sherriff Dun how much longer he thinks Tyrone and Santi are going to stall before they make it official.”

She is whisked away by the hand, trailing behind Mercy helplessly. Casting one hopeless look back at her uncle, she gives a miserable wave, and then is sucked up in the crowd.

Steven sighs “You two don’t have any children, do you?”

“No.” they reply in unison.

“Good! Don’t have them! And don’t let your siblings have them either. They’re the most distressing and wonderful things in the world at the same time.” he shakes his head thoughtfully “It’s like having a vital organ crawl out of your body and try to make its own way in the world.”

It does not even occur to Will at this moment to think of his step-son.

Meanwhile, Mercy has deposited America with Santi and Tyrone, leaving them with cheerful instructions to make her feel welcome and introduce her to a few more of the artists around.  
With them is Tahcawin, who has decided that the young couple are her best bet to cling to her sanity for the night, while Jack has been attached to the Sherriff through some turn of misfortune neither of them are quite sure how to explain.

Once America finds out that Tahcawin is one of the agents, she’s a fountain of questions “How come you guys are the only ones the FBI sent?”

“Well-”

“But ain’t the cult huge? How are you gonna take them all down?”

“With help from Santi’s grand-”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“No, I’ve got-”

“What about him? The older guy, talking to the Sherriff? Is he your partner?”

“For now-”

“How many do you think are in the cult? How old are they?”

Tahcawin takes a deep breath, and her next words come out so fast it is difficult to tell one from the other “We don’t know much but the investigation is still in its early stages and we’re optimistic about the end results.”

Then she takes another deep breath, bracing herself on her knees.

America is awe-struck “How old are you?”

“I’m not 30 yet.”

Tyrone whispers to Santi “I want to adopt her.”

“Which one?”

“Both of them.”

While Tahcawin is recovering from the gushing Southerner, she catches Jack’s eye. A look passes between them that speaks volumes- volumes of curses and desperate wishes to be back in the shared bedroom with Winston and Jack’s emergency whiskey. 

Jack has been listening to some prattle about the case that he might have found useful and informative if he weren’t already bored out of his mind.  
Sharon and the Sherriff are discussing the case at length with one Carter Carter, whose son Jack remembers interviewing earlier in the week. Samson Carter, the one whose face was Lecter-ish enough to merit a note to follow him up in research.

It is only by years of training and experience with situations such as these that Jack is able to look at his father straight “I understand your concerns Mr Carter, but I can also assure you that tonight’s exhibition is safe.”

He waves a hand dismissively “Oh, I’m not worried about the exhibition. I’m more worried that we’re going to step out tonight and discover a pair of bodies posed on the pavement.”

“Morbid.” says Jack, adding a mental note to check out the father as well.

“But also nothing to worry about.” corrects the Sherriff “That cult hasn’t done a thing since the child under the bridge. We got them on the run, bringing in these new agents. They’re scared, I betcha that much!”

Samson materialises at Carter’s elbow “Dad, can I go to Noor’s shop really quickly? A friend is waiting for me outside.”

Carter sighs “Son, we were just talking about that cult. You couldn’t have picked a worse time to ask me to go somewhere.”

“What if I ask Tyrone to walk with me?”

“Tyrone Collins? Why him?”

“He offered. He’s scared about the cult too.” Samson’s dead eyes fall on Jack, rather unexpectedly, and send a slight shiver up Jack’s spine.

He’s not really afraid. He’s more offended that the boy would look at him like that and presume that Jack doesn’t know there’s something wrong with him.

“How far away is Ms Noor’s shop?” asks Jack.

“Ten minutes.”

“Well, Sherriff, if you think you can spare me for that long, then I’d be happy to walk Samson over there.”

The Sherriff is not happy, but neither is he heartless “Alright. Take Tyrone too, just in case.”

Just in case the cult does actually attack, then it would be very convenient for the Sherriff if Tyrone were to die or to be so changed by whatever assault he endures that he is never the same.  
Jack feels very sorry for the grandson and the struggle he has facing him, winning his grandfather’s approval back.

Carter thanks him profusely and sends his son off with a clap on the shoulder.   
On his way out, Jack taps Tahcawin on the shoulder.

“If we’re not back in twenty two minutes maximum, call some back-up and find us.”

She nods “Walk safely, sir.”

Jack turn to go and nearly collides with a tall, plain teenage girl in a modest dress that has sprinkling of crumbs on the high collar. She stares at him in amazement.

Jack edges around her and follows Samson into the brisk night. Again, just at the top of the steps, he has to step smartly around another woman.

“Excuse me.” her English has a light, pleasant Eastern accent to it.

“Excuse me.” echoes Jack “Sorry.”

Chiyoh watches Jack Crawford walk after the blond boy that leads him into the night, for a few silent moments. When he has disappeared entirely, she makes her way through the crowd to Hannibal and Will to inform them of the interesting development in the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Southerner over here. Spent every summer in this charming little back-water berg in South Carolina, and a lot of time in North Carolina. Speaking a little bit from experience when writing out America's stuff.


	19. The closet man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, we've got a lot-bit of psychological manipulation among siblings. It was disturbing to write, and I'm sure it's going to be disturbing to read, so sorry in advance for that

LaToya enjoys being home alone.

The night is just about the only thing that can effectively silence his younger siblings and his father. Without them conscious, he no longer has to act for their sakes.  
Once sleep has removed them from the world, he removes himself from his shell- his people suit, as his favourite writer Freddie Lounds would put it.

During the day, he takes long naps, for which the entire family criticises and teases him for. His father calls him ‘Kitten’, making fun of the way he spends at least 3 hours of every waking day during the summer or winter breaks asleep. His mother does not begrudge him for what she refers to as his ‘little quirks’, although he has seen her internet history, and seen that she is gradually checking the symptoms of each of the illnesses in the world which are known to cause excessive sleep and endless fatigue.  
Right now, she seems to think he has a case of slow-moving meningitis. 

LaToya prefers to be up at night. Especially since he discovered Freddie Lounds.

Her book on the Great Red Dragon is mostly what the late hours of his late nights are devoted to. When his parents go to sleep at around 11 or 12, sometimes as early as 10, if he is lucky, LaToya will rise about an hour later from a light sleep. He goes to the secret spot where he has hidden his mother’s book, stolen from her shelf many months ago with the aid of a stool and a trash-grabber, retrieves it, along with the notes he has taken on Francis Dolarhyde.

The book is excellent. At his age and his level of schooling, LaToya doesn’t always understand every philosophical concept or historical event or psychologic disorder that Lounds references in her works. As a result, he has ended up spending a lot of time in the library at the weekends and after school.  
His parents’ friends and the librarians think it’s precious and amazing; a child who is just about to hit double digits, reading his way through ‘The battle of the light brigade’ and accounts of the Stanford Prison experiment, in a reading chair that dwarfs him, with the aid of a dictionary that also dwarfs him.

His choice in subject is a little morbid, perhaps, but that’s just another sign of his advanced intelligence, isn’t it? Often, the adults that also frequent the library will approach his chair to see the book du jour.  
For them, he wears an innocent smile and speaks in the serious voice of a child trying to sound older than his years, rather than one smoothly disguising just how ancient he truly is in mind.

He actually has a friend in the library. Not that they have ever spoken beyond a basic, polite greeting and a few book recommendations, once the man realised what he was interested in. LaToya’s favourite library-dweller comes by on the days he has no class to teach, nor anything in his garage to keep him busy, or a previous engagement at his beautiful home.  
When LaToya is in the library, at least thrice in two weeks, Will Graham will also be there.

He prefers to be called Mark Columbus these days.  
LaToya’s understanding of adult relationships is detailed, and viewed through lens of scorn so scathing he is surprised his stupid, co-dependent, lying parents aren’t burned up every time he is forced to look at them together, but…but he still has to wonder if Will has changed his surname.  
As LaToya understands it, he doesn’t even have to give up his old name entirely. He could just stick ‘Lecter’ on the end and call it good and legally binding. 

Maybe he hasn’t changed it at all, because Will Graham just doesn’t want to give in? That last little reminder of his old life, of the good man he was while the bad man was timid and lurked inside, longing for the correct opportunity to show himself?  
Or maybe it’s because Will Lecter just doesn’t have the right sound to it.

These are the kinds of things LaToya ends up falling asleep with inside his head.  
Sometimes, he asks himself questions like: would he rather his name be LaToya Graham or LaToya Lecter?  
LaToya Lecter sounds like a try-too-hard-name. LaToya Graham is a more solid and sensible name.

Unlike LaToya Johansson. He does not know if he dislikes the name more or the parents that gave it to him.

Tonight, LaToya ponders this interesting conundrum as he sneaks from his room. His mother could come back unexpectedly from her engagement at the gallery, but he doubts it. Sharon Johansson is not one to shy away from cultural events, when she can help it. God knows she gets very little of it in that gung-ho, testosterone, estrogen fuelled hell-hole she calls a work-place.  
And besides, she has the agents with her tonight. She cannot bear to be rude in front of out-of-towners, let alone those who belong to the FBI. What if they thought her entire department useless and incompetent, and her, a gigantic, unforgivable buffoon?

If they have half a brain cell between them and that dog, then they will notice.

Despite his convictions that she will not return early, he reasons that it will be best to check the agents’ room before getting down to his reading and study for the night.  
Just in case.

He glides past his parents’ room silently. Inside, he can hear his father tossing and turning his way through a lonely night. His brother’s room is next. Sharon Jr snores gently. LaToya pauses to pop his head through the door, as it is ajar, and he wants to make sure he will not wake him as he closes it.  
Sharon Jr sleeps, limbs flung out like a suicide victim who has just fallen from an immense height.  
His coffee-coloured throat is exposed to the ceiling.

LaToya still doesn’t like him. He wishes he had died in childbirth, and maybe taken his mother with him, while he was at it. Killing three birds with one stone; his mother, his brother, and his intolerable little sister, who never would have happened if only Sharon had been dead before she could conceive her.  
He leaves Sharon Jr to sleep like a dead man, and goes to check on Malin.

“Toy!” she burbles at the sight of him, poking his head around the door.

He puts his people-suit back on “Malin. Go to sleep. It’s really late.”

“You’re awake.” she counters.  
She’s extraordinarily argumentative for her age.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” he lies “You need to go to sleep, or the closet man will come and get you.”

She shakes her head “Mama says the closet man isn’t real.”

“That’s only ‘cos Mom can’t see him no more. Mom’s a big lady, an’ a police officer. He wouldn’t mess with her. But you’re just a little girl and you ain’t even in school yet. He’d eat you in one bite.” He snaps his teeth for effect.

She flinches, but refuses to be intimidated “I’d scream for Daddy and he’d come and beat the closet man up.”

LaToya edges into her room, carefully stepping over what looks like the remnants of a great toy battle “Daddy’s not as tough as the closet man.”  
He reaches her bed. He gathers up the scrunched corners and folds of the princess patterned blanket and tucks it up to Malin’s waist. He thinks about pushing her fat, fragile head to her dinosaur pillow-case (perhaps the only thing that LaToya likes about his sister- she knows how to be a girly-girly and one of those fabled ‘tom boys’ at the same time), but then she would start screaming and maybe tell their father in the morning.

Instead of risking that, he goes to the dark closet and opens one door, exposing a darker interior. Malin immediately claps her hands over her eyes and lets out a tiny mewl of distress.

“Closet man ain’t here yet. You need to be asleep for when he is, otherwise he’s gonna come and get you and take you to Hell.”

She shakes her head “I ain’t done bad stuff. Hell’s for bad people.”

“The closet man doesn’t care. He takes the good and the bad just the same. Look, should I go in and see if the door to Hell is open yet? If it is, then I can show you he’s real. I can take you right down to the closet man and we can talk to him about how real he really is.”

She does not respond until he puts a foot in the closet, acting as if he is about to walk into the shallow box of rumpled clothes and soft, plush dolls. 

“No!” whispers Malin “No, no, don’t go! I’ll be good! I’ll go sleep, I promise!”

He turns and gives her a very hard look “You promise?”

She nods, her curls bobbing manically “Double promise.”

“Ok. But you know what happens if you break a double promise.”

Her nod is solemn this time “I get bloody nose and then a bloody brain.”

When she lies back, LaToya tucks her in. He kisses the tip of his fingers and puts them to her forehead, the way he would stick a stamp on an envelope. Malin smiles up at him.

“Nighty night, Toya.”

“Nighty night, Malin.”

“If closet man comes to get me, can I call and you can come save me?”

He smiles without humour “Sure.”

She closes her eyes, then sticks her head under her pillow and makes sure not a single extremity is poking out of the blanket, where it could be seized or snipped off.

“…which is, in summation, why the focus of this exhibition, I believe, has moved from a condemnation of what was an undeniably evil man to a celebration of the human psyche and soul.”

Mercy Water’s speech ends to thunderous applause. Had she been an actress on a stage, she would have gotten several curtain calls and a few roses thrown at the stage.  
As she steps from the podium, flushed by her success and the glass of Shiraz in her hand, Hannibal considers repeating the sentiment about the best speeches and alcohol, but decides against it. He originally shared that observation with Bedelia, and he promised himself that he would not be giving Will any recycled romance when he came out of the pseudo marriage with Bedelia.

There is always a difference between the rehearsals, dress or not, and the real thing.

And then Will surprises him by saying: “Have you ever noticed how the best speeches on the human condition always come after their speaker has had a few drinks to grease the tongue?”

Hannibal smiles “Yes, I have. Isn’t it strange?”

“I would say it’s more telling about us than anything- what’s that smile for?”

“Nothing, dear. Nothing.”

They have picked a quiet spot to watch the opening speeches. Not at the back, which would make them all the more conspicuous. Towards the front and off to the side. Kind of tucked away into a corner, so that anyone looking ahead might see the backs of their heads or an elbow, but little else.  
Certainly not enough to confirm the identities of the unexpected parties in attendance; the Murder Husbands.

From here, they can see the woman who first gave the moniker.  
She receives a triumph-red Mercy from the podium with open arms, half to congratulate her, half in anticipation of a drunken stumble.

“Her prosthetic fits her very well.” notes Hannibal “I could imagine it was always a part of her body.”

“It wasn’t.” says Will flatly, not in the mood for poetry when it concerns Freddie Lounds “You know what happened to the original part.”

“A slow-roast. An experimental blend of spices.”

“You think she still dreams about it?”

“I don’t see how she could avoid thinking about it. The reminder is attached to her, quite literally.”

It is a stroke of unexpected luck that Hannibal declined to make his own speech. Public speech is not something he still enjoys. After entering this relationship, the last in his life, he has found that he prefers to save his energy for conversation with people close to him. At this particular moment in time, that circle is limited mostly to Will, and the dogs.  
He reasoned privately, as he declined several times what the other staff putting together the project with him asked, that even though he would be addressing a large crowd, he would really only be talking to Will anyway.

The chance he will be recognised is slim, thanks to the way the FBI has been slowly expunging all photographic record in the typical Orwellian manner, but the fact remains that the exhibition, falling nearly on the fourth anniversary of the death of the Great Red Dragon, is also their anniversary.  
A private moment, to be celebrated and acknowledged between only them.

In a way, the exhibition is Hannibal’s gift to Will. They are not in the habit of exchanging anything but the normal pleasantries on their anniversaries. But when Hannibal was presented with the opportunity to assist in arranging and hosting the event, he saw no reason to refuse. In his mind, he has dedicated the entire exhibition to his husband.

Will does not need to be told.

After four years, he knows Hannibal well enough to recognise one of his extravagant, romantic gestures when he sees one. Rare is the occasion when one of these gestures does not come in the form of a nice dinner prepared from a freshly killed drifter, or one of those victims before Hannibal has killed them.  
Still, Will has to recognise, that even when Hannibal departs from his norms, he does a fantastic job of being romantic.

It is just convenient that this gesture does not involve Hannibal getting up to make a speech in front of an audience that includes Freddie Lounds, still baring her scars proudly, and Jack Crawford, suckling at the alcohol to get himself through the night.

 

Dysphoria.

A word he had to investigate with a thick Webster’s dictionary that he hides on a low shelf near to his spot in the library. When the dictionary definition did not satisfy, he pursued the varieties of dysphoria that have been documented and reported across the years in textbooks on psychology, in dusty old articles and editions of magazines which hadn’t been touched for several years.

The most famous type of dysphoria is gender dysphoria, when the psychology and character of a person is mismatched to the biological gender they have been assigned to.  
Not what Francis Dolarhyde had at all, but there was a faint suggestion in one chapter of Lounds’ books, in a reference to Buffalo Bill, a criminal whom Hannibal had taken down with some outside help during his incarceration, whose mental state was blamed on a mis-diagnosis of gender dysphoria which the man fixated on and was made crazy by.

Next, there is body dysphoria. Sufferers of this disease become obsessed with an area of their body- for example, people with body dysphoria related to their hair will wash it constantly.  
This is kind of what Francis Dolarhyde had. Such a strong, obsessive case of body dysphoria that the area of obsession was his entire body.

The obsession turned to delusion as Dolarhyde sought a more powerful physical form to inhabit, believing that becoming another, greater beast than the man he was would redeem him of his insecurities.

LaToya’s got a small notebook full of notes on this, and Dolarhyde in particular.  
As short-hand for Dolarhyde’s advanced case of dysphoria, exacerbated by the delusion and the ultimate break from reality, he has written ‘fucking crazy’.

That’s what he likes about Lounds’ books. In her articles, much of what she types is pandering to her readership- sensationalism and scandals and scorned love and all of that. LaToya thinks the reason she initially took the romantic angle on their relationship was for the extra spice to the story that a forbidden, unrequited love tale would add. Not because she was actually aware of it being there, the love.  
LaToya has seen it first hand and he understands how she could have missed it, even though she studied each man in as excruciating detail as she could manage. The two men both live in shells. 

Will’s shell was created by his extreme capacity for empathy, and fuelled and cemented by the horrible things he had encountered in his working life.  
Hannibal’s shell was created by something similar. With him, LaToya can only guess. He has only seen the man in passing, on the streets, or picking Will up from the library.  
Now, their shells have fused. Like two hermit crabs sharing a living space.

Their relationship is subtle and understated. They are not one of the couples who practically wear each other- like the couples LaToya has set about ridding the town of.

Couples like Dean and Mahiru, who are so pleased to be in love they want everyone to know about it and celebrate along with them.

In LaToya’s notebook, a few pages away from where he takes notes on this disorder and that element of the criminal mind, he has drawn up a list of the Hand’s victims so far. As well as some short, important details about the murders.

Next to Mahiru’s name, he has drawn an arrow away to the margin, where a note is scrawled: ‘castrated himself for D’.  
LaToya was not present for that murder. It had been Liberty to suggest them as victims, and Lakshmi who investigated how suitable they would be for the cult’s purposes. Whenever a new couple is suggested, LaToya insists on having Lakshmi scope them out if she were not the one who first suggested them.  
She is the one who understands best the point LaToya is trying to make.

And it was her who had handed Mahiru the knife he used to comply to their wishes. She told him that he did the deed without flinching, without crying. The entire time, he talked to Dean. He was telling Dean how they were going to survive, even though he must have known how helpless they were, and the fact that their assailants had left their faces uncovered definitely meant that they were not planning to allow for an escape.

LaToya was impressed. 

Beneath them, is another couple whose murder he was also absent for. They are the only two which he missed. The second was largely unremarkable and disappointing, he supposes, for the male half of the couple, who was abandoned by his girlfriend.  
The moment it became apparent that their car had been surrounded, she let out a hair-raising shriek and dashed away into the shadows. Not thinking clearly, clearly. She got two feet into the woods before she was shoulder-charged by Samson and knocked to the floor. Lakshmi reported how Samson held her down by the throat and struck her in the face until her large nose had been knocked inwards, and her teeth were falling to the back of her throat.

Then, with Roman’s aid, he dragged the half-corpse back to the car, where the boy waited in silence, locked in, and unable to move his car since Tyrone and Marlene dropped a load of bricks on the hood. That, that thing with the bricks, was a tad excessive and betrayed the fact that the cult had pre-meditated some of the murders, but he has yet to scold them for it.  
At least it worked. And besides, the town knowing that the cult has plans makes the murders a little more satisfying.

The girl, Carrie, had her mess of a face plastered to the passenger window.  
The boy, Declan, was told to leave the car if he wanted her to live.

He said “She’s already as good as dead.”  
And so, his last moments were spent in screaming terror as Samson and Marlene made their way into the car, with the aid of a crowbar and a hammer respectively. 

LaToya counts that particular murder as an unqualified success, though, perhaps, it would have been far more gratifying if they were able to make the couple watch each other be murdered.

The term is ‘M.O.’, an abbreviation of the Latin ‘modus operandi’.  
The Hand of Jophiel’s M.O. is gangland in its methods, with extensive beatings and torture before the ultimate deaths. The M.O. is strictly observed- more like the criteria for admittance to an exclusive club than anything.

LaToya, using the wealth of resources in front of him, has judged himself to be a special kind of psychopath. There are the obvious indications, such as his inability to empathise (it always comes down to empathy, doesn’t it?) and his early childhood habits of tormenting small animals to make himself feel better after a bad day.  
Samson is another classic psychopath, with his cold distance and textbook indifference for his parents and the human race in general. 

Lakshmi has some kind of anger disorder. She able to consciously control her emotions as much as any other average person, but unable to find outlets to vent these pent up emotions that do not involve injuring others in some way. 

Liberty and Rosalie are in search of something to give their small lives meaning, and have found that taking others’ away makes them feel like big, important people.

Louise has trouble relating to people and has chosen to take this problem of hers out on others, again, through vicious murders. 

Tyrone is still a tad confusing. He has no real reason to be angry with the world, apart from his boyfriend’s grandfather’s reluctance to accept his relationship with the aforementioned grandson. Perhaps the lack of things to complain about is why he is here. No struggle; no sense of achievement.  
LaToya’s father’s favourite movie addresses some of those issues. He once allowed LaToya to stay up late while his mother was out training late, to watch ‘Fight Club’ with him, though he covered his son’s eyes during the racy scenes and sang ‘Row, row, row your boat’ over the moaning.

Tyrone reminds him of the young and the promising men that ended up in that underground club, ready to beat each other to a pulp or to be on the receiving ends of one of those devastating encounters, just to give a sense of meaning to an otherwise hollow day. 

Marlene is a cold-blooded killer, plain and simple. As if her desire to practice archery was not enough evidence for her proclivities towards violence already.  
Lounds wrote sparingly on the Verger scandal in her book for fear of inviting the outrage of Margot Verger and her elite legal team. What little she wrote concerned mostly Mason Verger, and his obsessive desire to wear Will Graham’s face.

Sometimes, when LaToya and Will are alone in their respective spots, LaToya wishes he could find a suitably sneaky way to ask how accurate that account of the slaughter at Muskrat farm is.  
And how did Lounds get the information anyway, since the only witnesses and survivors of that dinner at Mason Verger’s table would have been Hannibal and Will themselves?

 

Anyway, the point LaToya is getting at is the fact that in many ways, Marlene’s simple desire for wanton violence reminds him of Mason Verger’s.

And then there’s Roman.  
Roman doesn’t know what he is doing there and LaToya gets sicker and sicker of the sight of him each time he is forced to interact with him. The only reason at this point that Roman Wallender is still alive is because his cousin is in the police force, and that is an invaluable link to have in circulation around the cult.

Speaking of Roman, he should be meeting Tyrone soon. When that transaction is finished, he will come to LaToya’s with the message. He has thought his situation over and decided it is best to get another in on the search.  
LaToya and Roman will search the agents’ room together and see if they can’t turn something up to make their deaths easier to execute and conceal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, graphic murder descriptions. I may have forgotten to mention that there would be graphic murders discussed.


	20. A proposition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tend to listen to classical music while writing this, but you can only listen to Debussy's 'Flaxen haired girl' so many times before it's time to move on. Which leads me to this question; does Lindsey Stirling count as classical music?

“This is a remarkable piece.”

Already flushed from the alcohol and the praise, Mercy turns, and finds herself being addressed by a small Asian woman. Perhaps Japanese, or a light-skinned islander.   
She is dressed beautifully and immaculately, and carries herself like a woman used to commanding the respect and the attention of everyone in the room. Mercy likes her immediately, due in no small part to the fact that she likes her painting.

“Thank you.” says Mercy graciously “I’m sorry, I don’t think we have been introduced, Ms…?”

“Murasaki.”

“Beautiful name. Japanese, correct?”

“Yes, but I lived most of my life in Eastern Europe.”

Mercy makes an appreciative, appropriately interested noise “You know, a dear friend of mine was in Latvia earlier this year.” she then draws in closer, her face growing secretive “Don’t spread it about, but my friend has got a killer story in the works. It’s going to revolutionise the way the media presents Ukraine and Russia’s struggle with each other, if the media has half an ounce of sense.”

Pointing Freddie out, Mercy’s secretive look is replaced with a proud smile.  
Chiyoh cannot muster a smile back when she notices who Freddie Lounds has snagged to talk to. She has the Sherriff, and going by her serious expression, is discussing something very, very dark. Chiyoh does not have to be within earshot to understand Freddie is attempting to talk about Hannibal and Will’s case with the man.   
Fortunately for them, the Sheriff seems to be far more interested in analysing Freddie’s modest neckline than he does her ideas and opinions about the murderers.

Still, Chiyoh is going to have to get her away from the Sheriff, in case she does actually manage to say something interesting enough to tear his eyes from her breasts.

To give herself time to think, Chiyoh turns back to the painting.

It says a great deal about the woman who painted it, and much of what is said concerns a failed romance.  
Dolarhyde’s raised, desperate hand grasping to the heavens as he falls tells of a rejection, or a failure in a relationship that Mercy was ultimately cast from by the other partner. Will might be able to tell at a glance whether it was a spurned advance or a violent split in an already establishing couple. The red that surrounds him speaks of a lasting anger that this love did not pan out the way the artist so badly needed it to- and again, Chiyoh cannot help but wish that Will was here to interpret the painting for her more comprehensively. Although if he were, she would probably not appreciate him condescending to explain the painting to her.

Finally, the dragon’s jaws which wait at the bottom of the canvas to snap shut on Dolarhyde and devour his evil must be what Mercy is afraid she will be consumed by. Either a depression that was triggered by the break-up and the other difficulties that sprout when one loses a life-partner, or a fear that she has yet to experience the full effects of her lost love.

Chiyoh doubts that the painter has any idea of how much of herself has been mixed into the oils and the turpentine to create this piece. If she did, she would have hidden it away and refused to share such an intimate piece with anyone.

She turns to the woman to ask her if there is a title to the piece, as it is not included on the plaque that announces Mercy’s name, but her words halt in her throat when she spots a man dressed in a fringed leather jacket and a pair of speedos straining about his crotch walk by.   
Noticing that her new friend has frozen in what appears to be horror, Mercy glances over her shoulder.

Her reaction is far lighter “We artists come in all shapes and sizes, don’t we?”

Be it her Eastern modesty or her shock that anyone in the world would have the gall to walk into an art gallery and mingle with finely dressed people in a pair of speedos, Chiyoh cannot recover her faculties of speech. She wants to say something clever, as a kind of apology for the insipid surprise colouring her features. But she just can’t.  
With no option left to her and throwing all ideas of courtesy to the wind, Chiyoh puts her back to the woman and walks away, her head down. She ignores Mercy calling her back.

Because her head is down, her shoulder collides with another’s for the second time that night.

“Excuse me.” says Agent Tahcawin Walker.

The other woman doesn’t respond. Doesn’t give any indication she is aware of being touched at all.

“Shellshock.” observes Santi “You should have seen Tyrone’s mother. The moment she finished the piece, she threw herself on the floor and started to cry.”

“I wonder which painting she did?” Tahcawin looks around to see if she can figure out which exhibit the woman has come from, but no such luck.

“Oh, hey, Professor Columbus!”

Santi waves over a good-looking, dark-haired man somewhere in his early forties. His suit is impeccable, as is the pleasantly vague look on his face. Tahcawin knows the look of a man who sometimes has to practice his benign and happy face in the mirror- she spent countless hours fixing her smile, when the stress from the Big-Ex was getting to be too heavy on her mind.

But with the confidence he carries himself, he must either be the guy who pulled this whole exhibit together, or the curator’s plus-one. 

“Hello, Santiago. How’s your grandfather?”

“Still arresting people, I guess.”

“You must be Agent Walker.” without hesitation, he extends a hand.

As they shake hands, Tahcawin notes the polished gold ring on his finger jealously. It’s a beautiful ring. It must have been an equally beautiful moment, when he was given it.  
Or maybe he was the one who proposed instead? That’s right; the men traditionally propose, don’t they?

“This is Professor Mark Columbus, from the university,” Santi laughs nervously, as if he has just made some kind of glaring mistake “Actually, he’s a mechanic full-time and a teacher only part time. The university’s professor for behavioural psychology has been struggling with bowel cancer for some time, and Professor Columbus picks up the lessons that the old teacher can’t make it to.”

“A behavioural pshycologist and a mechanic,” she muses, suddenly feeling quite inadequate with her position in the FBI “That’s quite the combination.”

“Thank you.” says Mark Columbus. He doesn’t seem to enjoy being praised.

But what an odd combination indeed. Psychology has to be the career path he chose later in life, because who picks mechanics as the other half of a double degree in behavioural science?

She can’t help but think she has heard of that somewhere- that particular combination of skills, from one of the people who mentored her during her career training in the FBI. She’s so fresh from the days of training that she can still remember all of the names and faces of the people who trained her. In particular, the man who allowed her class to sit in on the examination of a body that had been found floating in a river, face-down and full of fishhooks (a fisherman’s revenge, as it turned out, on his wife’s girlfriend).

Afterwards, he asked her if she would like to take a break from her day for a coffee with him. Somehow, he knew her as Miriam Lass’s niece, although with the extreme difference in race and the startling closeness with age, she has no idea how he managed it.  
His name was Zeller, and he told her a good deal about the case that broke her aunt’s mind and willpower. A good deal about the men and women involved in it too. By the time they were finished talking, they had each had two coffees and a pastry, just to give them an excuse to keep their table in the café for a while longer.

She would guess that is how she feels she knows Professor Columbus; Zeller had mentioned someone on the case that was a mechanic by day, and a behavioural expert by night. The FBI's own Batman, said Zeller, and just about as tormented as the Bat too.   
And he probably just has one of those faces that everyone mistakes for belonging to someone they know or have seen before.

“I was told there are two of you?”

“Oh, Agent Crawford is here tonight. He left just a moment ago to help one of the sons of the artists.”

Santi shifts his weight nervously “So did Tyrone. I wish he wouldn’t wander off like that when there’s a dangerous cult on the loose.”

“I have to wonder about that.” says Tahcawin, more to herself than to the others.

But Santi responds anyway “What do you mean by that?”

“I have to wonder if they are a cult at all. They seem to be more of a gang that has chosen to call itself a cult because of the connotation that carries in this country.” she tucks a stray curl behind her ear “You and I are far too young to remember the era, Santi, and I’m sure Professor Columbus was just starting elementary school in the 70s, when cults were a major problem. The Mason family, the Children of God, or the Family as they’re called now…I think, being that America is at its heart still a religious country and it frightens people to think that there are…criminals who are just so charismatic and convincing that they can grasp straight into the hearts of your average, red-blooded American and make them into a crazy person. If they are a cult, then it’s got to be in a satanic sense of the word. But they’re not even that. There is no religious dogma going on here. It’s all just fireworks. The word ‘cult’ is just the packaging.”

Santi looks uncomfortable “Hmm…so then they have absolutely no code of religious morals? Because that was what was kind of comforting me. The thought that they must have some kind of set of morals, because they weren’t killing very young children.”

“That child they found beneath the bridge,” says the professor softly- obviously, discussing dead children is not something he enjoys doing “Didn’t the cult do that?”

“Oh, no! It doesn’t begin to fit their M.O.”

“What if he was a witness?” asks Santi.

Again, Tahcawin shakes her head and knocks the stray strand of hair out of place again “His behaviour up to the day was normal. He didn’t seem like he had been pressured into silence by a dangerous group of murderers, and he wasn’t reported missing until after he was killed, going by what forensics uncovered. It seemed like he was stumbled across by some lunatic totally independent of the cult and killed as he was playing, then stashed under the bridge, then reported missing when he didn’t come home for dinner. I hope I’m not putting you off your drink, Santi?”

“What?” he glances at the largely untouched glass of wine in his hand, which does bear a striking resemblance to freshly spilt blood, now that she looks at it with blood on her mind “Oh, no, I’m just holding this to look like I belong here.” he laughs nervously “Like I said, art is bewildering to me. Give me a quadratic equation any day.”

Tahcawin laughs politely, and racks her brain for the remnants of her high-school education. What the hell is a quadratic equation? All mathematical problems look the same to her. Just an orgy of numbers that smart people write out to make themselves look even smarter. 

“Ah, there’s your colleague.” says Professor Columbus.

She turns in time to see Jack being led away by an Asian woman in a gorgeous dress. Must be one of the artists. A few of them have come up to him already to ask if their likeness of Dolarhyde is accurate, and what he thought of the last case that he was ever to work on. That’s not how the artists have phrased it, of course, but she can tell that is how Jack thinks of it. 

“I’m going to need to talk to him tonight.” he adds absently.

“Why don’t you go now? He’ll be glad of the rescue, I’m sure.”

He smiles faintly “I guess I will. Pleasure meeting you, Agent Walker.”

She doesn’t watch him leave. Instead, asks Santi what exactly a quadratic equation is.

 

Jack has found himself in a vulnerable position.

He followed this woman because her complaint seemed genuine. From the way she kept her face hidden by looking to the ground and acting as if she was ashamed to be addressing him with such a trivial thing, he thought, with good reason, he would have no problems if he did chose to follow her. 

Even an ex-cop’s brain is always on the look-out for enemies. It makes a murderer of everyone and anyone. By the time he agreed to follow her to investigate the strange noise she had heard while attempting to find the ladies’ room, he had already calculated the risks she posed.   
Perhaps she would come at him with a hairpin. Or with her bare hands, which could be far more deadly than any gun or knife. He doubted that she had any concealed weapons, in the dress that she wore. Not unless she was making creative use of some very private body cavities.

What he suspects he miscalculated was the fact that he allowed himself to be lead away by a woman. Jack is not accustomed to thinking of women as objects of sexuality- nor has he been since marrying Bella, as she narrowed his focus so much that he was inclined to be surprised whenever one of his female co-workers mentioned a romantic encounter or some work-place harassment they were contending with. He is just not used to thinking of the opposite gender as a resource for romance or sex or whatever else it is men are supposed to do with and to women.

The general public is not aware of this, however. Should this woman attempt to derail his investigation efforts by claiming a sexual assault, how will he completely dispel these charges?

He won’t manage it. His efforts in the town will sour. Tahcawin will be a criminal by association, and the town will grow to hate them. Especially if the woman is a local, instead of some of the imported talent. They will grow to resent them so much, perhaps, that Purnell will have to pull them from duty and swap them out with other agents. But by then the town will have blamed Jack’s supposed crime on the FBI organisation at large, and they will be entirely opposed to the idea of having any FBI presence at all.

Well, fuck.

He had better hope she doesn’t make a move on him or claim that he made a move on her later, or the entire investigation will go belly-up.

She had better not have made a false claim just to get him out here. The novelty of playing the ‘good guy’ had gotten to his head, after walking those two boys to the coffee shop. He can’t imagine who they plan to meet there in the dead of the night, but he suspect it has something to do with drugs or exchanging illicit pornography.  
If it’s drugs, Tyrone better get himself straightened out for his man. That’s all the judgement Jack is going to make on the subject.

While he walked back to the art gallery, tugging his coat around him against the cold and thinking about what motivates a murderer, as he generally does when on his own on a cold night, he watched the gallery draw into view from the distance.   
It seemed to rise from the dark. Like a boat on the waves of an ocean at night. Jack should have been thinking of a large, luxurious ocean liner, but instead all he could think of was a lonely fisherman’s boat, staffed by only one man and occasionally visited by his significant others.

A fisherman who would not enjoy the cacophony of voices and laughter inside his boat, because they drowned out the noise of the ocean. A fisherman who wanted nothing from society and its inhabitants but solitude.

Jack wondered if he himself was that fisherman.  
He wondered if it were possible for him to simply walk away from his obligations in that gallery, and in that ship. If it were up to him, he would collect Winston from his borrowed home and leave the coat on the bed, on top of the quilted blanket that he sleeps under. Perhaps his shoes too.  
Then he would pick a likely looking piece of forest to disappear into, and leave no trace of himself or his dog if he could help it. No footprints at all.

Jack no longer feels like the kind of man who leaves footprints.

Instead of disappearing, he came back to the gallery. Before he could find Tahcawin this small woman approached him and asked in a timid and accented voice if he would mind terribly coming to investigate a strange noise she heard. Glass breaking, she thinks, and she would not be disturbing him under normal circumstances; she would have checked it herself, but with the cult around…

She left the sentence dangling in the air so Jack could offer his support. And what could he do, but offer it?  
He certainly could have taken Tahcawin along. But at the time he was asked for his company, Jack had completely forgotten he had a partner in the town at all. He had mistaken himself for the lone fisherman, and Tahcawin for some fever-dream cooked up for decent company on one of the stormier nights the ship would weather.

She probably isn’t even aware that he has come back yet.

Why has this woman kept her face turned from him?  
And why does she insist on taking only him? Was it a convenience of timing that he showed up and she recognised him as a competent member of law enforcement, or did she pick him out specifically and wait for his return to ask her errand?

By the time the woman stops, Jack is thoroughly prepared for an attack. He’s already got a series of responses planned.  
If she takes a swing at him, he’ll do a simple block and knee her in the stomach. If she comes at him with a knife, he’ll disarm her and pin her and shout for help until help comes. If she pulls a gun on him, he’ll jump behind the sarcophagus display to his right for cover and probably scream a few times, in spite of himself.

The room she has led him to is full of funeral equipment. A small annex, attached to a larger exhibit concerning ancient art. To lend some credibility to the modern takes on the tomb-paintings of Egypt (featuring celebrities or satires to do with family dinners, where the members of the family eat from a linen-bound body instead of a kitchen table) and death-shrouds cast from living faces and made with tinfoil, they brought in a few of the real articles.  
An Egyptian sarcophagus, painted with the face of a young boy, an artist’s interpretation of Viking funeral pyres and a few Victorian-era headstones that were either donated or stolen.

Fitting, thinks Jack, that this woman has brought him to a room equipped for a corpse of most of the major old or ancient societies.

This is his first clue that someone intends to kill him.

Although not immediately, because once the woman turns and speaks to a man in the shadows, and once Jack realises who she is speaking to, he also realises his life is in no immediate danger.  
Hannibal may be a vicious bastard with little in the way of mercy or humanity, but the man always did have the manners of a prince.

The door closes behind Jack before he has a chance to formulate a greeting that does not involve throwing something at him.  
He turns, feeling completely secure in turning his back on Hannibal, and sees Will Graham flicking on the lights.  
Halogen strips buzz to life overhead. The light catches Will’s wedding ring beautifully.

Jack considers his options.

“Hello Jack.” says Will, pleasantly enough, but with an edge of tiredness to his voice.

Jack decides to be polite “Hello, Will. Hello, Hannibal. I suppose congratulations are in order. How many years has it been?”

Will glances at his left hand “Almost four years.”

“I’m guessing you have a dog for every year.”

Hannibal smiles the soft, slightly reptilian smile that seems to represent smugness. Jack never was very good at reading the man’s face.

“We have only two, I’m afraid.”

So they are living well together.  
Jack had hoped in some small, petty way whenever he thought of them together that their personalities would not click together. An empath, always walking on the brink of insanity, hysteria and delusion; his fervent admirer, whose affections remained reserved for so long that when there was a chance to release them, the love was sure to be as violent as the murders for which he was famous.  
How could that ever work? One man reviling insanity and its inhabitants, and the other, so far above anything as pedestrian and human as insanity, but revelling in it all the same.

But they must be working well together.  
If Will had his way, there would be enough dogs to pull a sled and a few besides to keep his lap and feet warm. If Hannibal had his way, there wouldn’t be a speck of animal hair within a mile of his furniture, let alone of his marriage bed.

And yet, they have found a compromise, wherein Will is allowed to keep his love for dogs just as Hannibal is able to entertain his general distaste for creatures which do not know how to clean up after themselves. Sometimes, Will is grossed out by the amount of hair and mud the two dogs leave in their wake. More often, Hannibal is prone to fits of affection, where he will kneel in front of one of the dogs and scratch them under the chin, muttering sweet nothings in his native tongue.  
Jack can see it so clearly he wonders if he might have been there before- but that is a ridiculous notion.

He would never set foot inside a house the two of them shared without memory of it.  
Jack would never forget an experience such as seeing what happens when two great minds get together and share a living space.

“I believe you have met Chiyoh before?” Hannibal gestures to the small woman beside him.

When she lifts her head, Jack sees that he has, indeed, met this woman before.  
On the staircase of the apartment where he and Hannibal and Will were all last together. Her presence and identity kind of fell to the wayside; he grew distracted from their encounter and nearly entirely forgot it, when Hannibal started to saw Will’s head open with an electric power saw.  
He can still see the scar from that event on Will’s temple. He wonders how they manage to be a couple, in spite of all they have done to each other.

Sawing heads open. Stabbing in just the right place to leave the victim in serious pain, but without a single organ damaged. Setting lunatic admirers from insane asylums and bear-jaw wearing maniacs on each other.

Beverly Katz.

How does Will manage to live with himself, let alone the man who did it, when he shares a bed with Beverly Katz’s murderer?  
How could he marry that madman?  
And how can he be here, as bold as brass or bolder, facing Jack in a room filled with funeral equipment, and now going to stand beside his husband as if this meeting were the most natural thing in the world.

What the hell is Will Graham now?

Jack knows this is not their intention, but he also knows asking this particular question will really piss off Hannibal “Are you going to kill me?”

“No.” a flicker of irritation crosses Hannibal’s otherwise composed face “But we did think it best to approach you before you discovered us for yourself.”

“You guys just couldn’t resist the temptation to crash the party and bask a little in a tribute to the mess you made, could you?” he has to stop himself from spitting.

That smile of Hannibal’s changes from a smug one to a smugly satisfied one. The difference is so subtle Jack almost misses the change completely “Do you really think so little of us? I organised this entire event.”

“Almost single-handedly,” adds Will “His department was no help at all.”

Everything fits together in Jack’s head. He can hear the cogs of his own thoughts meshing and whirring frantically as they try to process this sudden turn.

So, it would seem that Hannibal has established himself as the curator of a museum, art gallery- whatever this place is, it’s downright classy. Placed himself at the centre of culture, as he tends to do. It ain’t Europe, but it’s not a totally tasteless little berg either. It’s comfortable. Quiet. Not somewhere Jack would have thought to look for them at all.  
Will is his spouse, of course, and more likely than not he is the famous Professor Columbus that students from the university idolise as a soft-spoken genius. Rightly so, too.

Will was a kind of genius of the human mind when Jack knew him, and now that he has transformed into something Jack cannot begin to recognise, it would seem that aspect of Will has not been changed so drastically.

Dr Faust and Professor Columbus.

When put together, the names sound too incongruous. The names are obviously intended to be a mockery of those who use them and believe them to be real.

He must ask, though, why not the other way around?

Is it not Will who has made a deal with the Devil? And is it not Hannibal benefiting from this deal, by exploring new and uncharted territories- but territories which have always been privately known by those who inhabit them.  
It seems to Jack that they chose the right names for themselves, then traded the aliases for fun.

“Then what do you want from me? Wouldn’t it have been more advantageous if you two feigned sickness and locked yourselves up in your house until we were gone? Or did you guess that the swarms of police that are going be on this place when I’m done would be just too much to handle, or to hide from?”

He knows these are all pointless questions to ask. The moment they knew there were agents coming to town, they would have laid down their plans. Clever and near fool-proof, if Hannibal and Will’s previous plotting is anything to go by. Now that they work in tandem instead of competing against each other in the bizarre courtship Jack watched for nearly three years, he can only shudder at the thought of what they are capable of.

“Jack, I don’t think I need to tell you we’re not responsible for the murders.” says Will hesitantly.

His hesitation does not come from a fear that Jack will not believe him. More from a general dislike of discussing his personal life. Jack suspects it has something to do with the small woman, still hovering in the shadows at Hannibal’s side. Her eyes lay on him in a way that reminds Jack of the seedier kinds of men and women who hang out at bars, looking for drinks to spike.

“I know that.” he says irritably “If it was you, you would have acted out segments of the triptych of ‘The Garden of Earthly delights’ or something. Not slaughtered. I know you, Hannibal, and I know you only butcher the people who especially offend you.”

The massacre at Muskrat farm was a textbook example of one of Hannibal’s little tantrums. Had Will not been dragged backwards into the ordeal with Mason Verger, then those men he killed would not have had their heads turned entirely around, nor their insides torn out in the snow for all to admire.   
Jack is going to have to tread carefully here.

“So,” he finishes “If you don’t want to sever your last connection to the FBI in killing me, what do you want from me?”

“If you think about it, I believe you will find it is a matter of what you want from us.” responds Hannibal coolly. 

Jack only has to ponder this for a minute “You want me to ask you to help with the investigation?”

The thought is so ridiculous he cannot bring himself to laugh in their faces. At the same time, it’s a terrifying thought; using two of the most cunning murderers he knows to track down the second most brutal murderers he has seen so far? (the first being Dolarhyde, whose messy, slap-dash kills made him just a little bit worse than Hannibal, when the other man’s artful poses and classical references were taken into account)   
What a strange notion.  
What a horrific one. It sounds like something a horror movie or a badly written thriller might invent to add an extra layer of complexity.

So ridiculous Jack is surprised he didn’t think of it himself.  
But maybe in a way, he has been considering this at the back of his mind since Tahcawin stepped over his threshold. 

For the second time, Jack considers his options “What exactly would this deal of yours entail? I assume I would have to leave you in peace at the end of it and never mention to the Bureau, or to the police here I was being helped?”

“That’s about it.” confirms Will “We’ll disappear for as long as it takes the town to be cleaned up, after you’ve caught your murderers.”

Clearly, they intend to be giving orders throughout this entire ordeal.

“One more thing you should know,” says Hannibal “Freddie Lounds is in attendance among the guests here tonight. On no account will you inform her of your relationship to us, before or after or during this process.”

Jack’s stomach plummets “How is it that the woman turns up underfoot every single time another major case crops up? You would think losing an arm would slow her down- that was you, wasn’t it?”

The older man smiles, but says nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick thank-you to everyone who has so far dropped by, commented, kudos-ed, or just lurked in the background and rubbed their hands with evil glee every time someone dies  
> This fic just hit over 5000 views, which is pretty much unprecedented for me, given my normal view-counts on other works. At this rate, if we're not careful, we might even hit 10,000 by the end of it!   
> So, thanks again to all. See you in the next chapter


	21. "Heck, just take all of her limbs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picked up a copy of Thomas Harris's 'Red Dragon' at a book festival today. Drew some looks for laughing evilly.  
> This one has Anthony Hopkins leering at me from the cover, which kinda goes against the now-cemented head-canon of Hannibal's face being Madds Mikkelsen's, but it didn't stop me from diving for the book the moment I saw it.  
> Bless that wonderful, deranged man Harris for coming up with the books that were turned into the TV show.

Margot has not eaten like this since Alana was pregnant.

Their pregnancy was standard, except for the circumstances of their son’s conception, and except for one weird thing that seemed to be some kind of sympathetic form of hysteria that affected Margot. Given that she had no womb with which to carry the child, as her bastard brother had undoubtedly fed the one that carried Hieronymus’s half-sibling to his pigs, Margot couldn’t be expected to experience the effects of her wife’s pregnancy.

However, defying all medical logic and pissing off their obstetrician quite thoroughly with the oddness of it, Margot develop cravings. The kind of insane, illogical cravings that ordinarily the pregnant half of the parents should be going through.  
The kind of cravings that had her extricating herself from their blankets in the middle of the night, as the fridge called to her and her stomach demanded an odd, possibly toxic concoction of peanut butter on sashimi, with a side of that pesto left-over from the pasta they had for dinner.

Once, Alana caught her coming home from a quick trip off the estate to a nearby convenience store. As her confused, and at this point, bulbously pregnant wife watched on, Margot unpacked several pints of gourmet ice-cream. She scooped some of each into a bowl, blasted that bowl in the microwave, then splashed a bit of hot sauce into the resulting soup.

“You’re not really going to eat that, are you?” asked Alana incredulously.

“I’m not sure,” Margot took a spoonful and sniffed it suspiciously, before tasting it delicately. She then gulped the entire spoonful down “Yes, apparently I am. Oh my God, this is delicious. Al, you’ve gotta try this.”

Alana wrinkled her nose “That’s – no, don’t come at me with that thing. You’re going to make me throw up.”

“Vanilla, mint chocolate chip and ketchup. Why are the greatest things always discovered by a happy accident?”

Whatever Alana was going to say was interrupted by a pop, not unlike the one made when a shaken bottle of soda is opened. Her nightdress was soaked at the crotch. Water, or rather, her waters, streamed down her legs and puddled between her slippers.  
As it turned out, Alana had come into the kitchen to look for Margot when she didn’t find her beside her in bed, where she should have been. Her contractions were starting. News so important as the approaching (and slightly early) birth of their son had fallen to the way-side when she saw the weird poison Margot was making in the micro-wave.

Well, the rest of it got poured down the sink, and Alana, hustled into the car. Margot personally drove through inner-city Friday-midnight Baltimore traffic to get her to the hospital, and ended up with three speeding tickets, and one threat of arrest if she ran another red light. Of course, when her legal team explained the reason for her reckless driving, the charges were forgotten.

Margot is thinking about that strange and perfect night- mostly because she’s in the process of making nearly the same dish she had that night.  
It surprises her that Hannibal would allow something like ketchup anywhere near his kitchen. She often thought, bitterly, of how if the man ever ate fries then he drenched them in blood instead of the tomato-paste alternative.

Margot cannot explain her desire to eat melted vanilla and mint ice cream mixed with ketchup. Perhaps Alana is pregnant again? That would require a substantial miracle; for two women to conceive without help, especially with one of them having had her womb and ovaries stolen by her grabby brother.

As she works in the glistening kitchen, she is sure to clean up after herself. She cannot afford to make herself anymore unwelcome and inconvenient than she already has. Surely, Hannibal will not be able to resist the draw of pummelling a little more of the will to live out of Bedelia- her sin, Margot has not decided on, but whatever Bedelia did to offend Hannibal must have been mortifying and unforgivable, if the condition he left her in is anything to go by.  
She has only seen Bedelia once, and then, only through the sights of a gun borrowed from Chiyoh.

Each bullet had already been spent on sabotaging the helicopter Bedelia and several of her (freshly expired) guards were going to take from Honolulu to the American mainland. As she was rushed inside, Margot seized the empty rifle from Chiyoh’s hands and stared at her family’s abductor.

It was no wonder the woman kept herself out of the public spot-light. When Margot had heard she had been attacked, again, Bedelia alleged, by Will and Hannibal, she figured the woman was going to make a killing off her experience. Freddie Lounds had already told and greatly exaggerated the story of the day she spent tied up in Will’s shed about a thousand times, while a likeness of her was tied to a wheelchair and set on fire.  
But the last bit of news obtained about Bedelia was simply that she had been attacked again, and was taking time off to recover.

Going by the wizened, withered thing she saw propped up in a wheelchair that dwarfed her, Margot would have to guess there were some complications with regards to Dr Du Maurier’s recovery. 

Margot is so caught up in her memories that she narrowly misses tripping over one of the dogs. The hideously ugly Shiba, who became her immediate favourite.

“Sorry, Girl.” she stoops and pats the dog’s scrunched face “I didn’t know you were down there.”

She looks around for the other one, just in case he has become jealous of the attention his counterpart is getting, but Actaeon is nowhere to be seen. She can hear him, however.  
Growling at the front door.

“What’s wrong, boy?” she takes a knife from the knife-block next to the stove and holds it slightly behind her “Someone at the door?”

The dog’s hackles are raised so high he actually looks like an angry cat instead of a dog. He is planted in front of the door, and quickly joined by Girl, as soon as Girl realises there is someone on the porch. She too growls, making her face hysterically ugly.

Margot peers around the door-frame.  
A silhouette stands outside; someone peering into the window mounted in the door. Looking for her, no doubt.

 

(Four years earlier; Muskrat Farm, the Verger Estate, Maryland)

Will is pretty relaxed, for a man who’s just had his temple cut open by a hack-saw.  
An electric one, at that.  
Somewhere over the course of the drive from whatever private air-strip they landed on to Muskrat farm, Will had a small kind of revelation. 

He was half-conscious, swimming in and out in a delirious haze of pain and almost certain that he was going to die, and he was alright with it.   
These were strange thoughts that played through his head, but the setting was appropriate. Suspended in the back of a white truck (really, Mason? How more of a cliché are you going to be before this trial has played itself out?), hanging there with Hannibal like a couple of hams, and he was totally fine with it.

He’d earned this death, he figured.   
He had earned his right to be hung by his ankles in the back of an unconvicted paedophile and murderer, alongside one of the most active and cultured murderers currently operating in the world, with a large gash in his forehead thanks to a hack-saw.

Will Graham had done battle with forces unimaginable, most of which came from inside himself, and he had essentially come out on top. Not intact. Reformed.  
Change was sometimes a good thing, he thought privately. Had Hannibal not gone at him with the saw in Italy, he might have felt compelled to share this little epiphany. But he was still mad at him- not mad, per se, since he understood on some level that Hannibal was also mad at Will for trying to stab him in the back after crossing an ocean to find him. Displeased was probably a better way to describe his complaint.

It was at the moment when the doors swung open and Mason Verger appeared in the snow, looking like he had fought a blender or a bear with only his face and spine and lost badly, that something awakened in Will. This something would be the same thing that earlier enabled him to kill the nutcase wearing the prehistoric bear mask.

The same thing that would greet Francis Dolarhyde on the crumbling, chalky cliff, and the same thing that allowed Will to take that final leap of faith at the end of it, when he was ready to collapse on Hannibal at last as the blue lights of the FBI’s vehicles bathed the space, so that the blood was no longer black, but some kind of weird purple.

Its first bit of exercise since the nutcase with the bear-skull was biting the cheek out of the plastic surgeon-cum-chef-for-a-rich-serial-killer, which was both a disgusting and utterly satisfying use of his time.

Not his first kill.  
Just a taste of those to come.

 

This is not the thought, however, that is on Will’s mind when he comes to in the car.  
He was not actually asleep, as Chiyoh is; sacked out in the back, exhausted from a night of vigilance and duplicity. He was dozing. So deep in thought that he ended up falling a little deeper into his consciousness, until his eyes closed and his head lolled off to the side. But he was still acutely and annoyingly aware of ‘In Paridisum’ playing softly over the speakers.

Now that he stirs back to the waking world, he realises he is smiling.

So does Hannibal “Penny for your thoughts.”

The road ahead is dark and barely light by the street-lights “You were in a high-chair.”

He gets a very strange look from his husband.

Will flounders with this funny little thing, trying to make sense of it so that Hannibal can understand why this amuses him so “At Mason Verger’s table. You were in a high-chair when they brought you in. I didn’t get one of those. I suppose one of them dumped me in the chair and strapped me in without worrying about restraints, from the van and to the table, because I was…indisposed,” it is not that they do not talk about they hack-saw incident, but they do prefer to avoid the subject where possible “And then they bring you in on a man-sized high-chair.”

Another weird look, in spite of his efforts.

Yawning, Will rubs his eyes “I’m sorry. I’m not making sense, am I?”

“You are very tired. The night was too long, I’m afraid.”

Will checks his watch and notes without much concern that it is now four in the morning “Just long enough.” he corrects, although, truthfully, he was ready to go home the moment they entered.  
Too many people for his liking.

Hannibal thoroughly enjoyed himself. Not only had the night gone off without a hitch, but they had also struck a bargain with Jack Crawford. Rediscovering one of his old favourite toys has put him in a good mood that, from experience, Will guesses is going to last for the rest of the week. 

“If you’re alright to talk, I wonder if we might discuss the other matter at hand?”

Will yawns “Yeah, I can stay awake.”

At that moment, ‘In Paridisum’ finishes and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor starts up. The iconic opening bars could not be more appropriate for the atmosphere that has filled the car. 

He is the first to say her name “Bedelia hasn’t given up on us. I didn’t think she would. Well, on you. She’s not that interested in me.”

Hannibal shakes his head “She is, my dear. Bedelia is interested in anyone I am interested in.”

“Interested in?” repeats Will in as light a tone as he can manage at this ungodly hour “What kind of interest? A dangerous obsession, or good old professional curiosity?”

“Bedelia is no longer a practicing psychologist. Any interest on her part can hardly be called professional,” Hannibal stops suddenly, and taps the breaks, just a white shadow whizzes across the road a few feet ahead of them “I believe that was one of the escapees.”

Indeed, when Will peers around him, he can see the white, chicken-shaped smudge landing on the roadside and hobbling rapidly off into the woods.  
Since the accident that stranded him and Margot in a sea of poultry, that same sea of poultry has dispersed into smaller puddles throughout the surrounding areas. At the coffee shop, Noor had to chase a few flour-covered birds from her store-room with a pot. A janitor turned on the lights the other night at the university’s auditorium to polish the floor, and discovered every square inch of the rafters occupied by chickens, with a liberal dusting of their excrement and feathers on the floor.  
Lastly and perhaps most amusingly to Will, this very morning, shortly after he had finished his business in the shed and was talking with Hannibal about what they might want to do about the Verger problem, a chicken ran smack into the kitchen window.

Both of them jumped. The chicken was definitely the most stunned of them all, though, and had to be barked at by two frantic dogs before it could recover sufficiently to take its leave in short, absurd bursts of flight.

Apparently, the chicken-problem is not going to go away on its own. Much like the Bedelia-problem.

“At any rate,” continues Hannibal “She is bound to pursue you just as she will chase me. Perhaps not with the same…” he pauses, searching for the appropriate word.

“Fervour.” supplies Will.

Hannibal nods “Fervour. You understand she still considers herself the appropriate mate for me? I had hoped that our time in Italy might have done something to dissuade her from the idea that she was going to be able to win me away from you, but it would appear not.”

Will, however, is not convinced “How do you know that? I would think that after you cooked and ate her leg, she’d be a little less eager for your attention.”

This elicits a soft chuckle from his husband “Bedelia is a slave to her desires, I am afraid. As long as we have known each other, I have been an especially fervent desire of hers. There is nothing I can do about it.”

It occurs to Will that Bedelia seems to be aggressively pursuing his husband in much the same way that Hannibal pursued him- at least, with the same sentiment behind it. More of a challenge than a courtship. The difference this time will be that, for the course of Bedelia’s courtship, it will be conducted without any reciprocating emotion on the other end of it.  
Hannibal has made it abundantly clear on several occasions when her name came up that he felt nothing for her, and if at some point he had, it would have been the affection one feels for a stray cat that visits their doorstep for a saucer of milk every other Wednesday night.

Certainly, she was cultured and intelligent, but she was not interesting. Nor could she offer anything new or foreign to him to engage Hannibal. When he pushed her a little, she did not push back. She only stumbled and came up with some clever remark about it later on.  
Had she been at Mason Verger’s table instead of Will, she would have never dreamed of taking a bite of the chef’s cheek in retaliation.

“Is there any way to convince her the two of you just aren’t meant to be?”

Hannibal shrugs “I wouldn’t know what would, as cooking and eating her leg has already failed to send the message.”

“Go back for the other leg, maybe?”

“That’s quite a suggestion.”

“Or an arm. Or both. Heck, just take all of her limbs.”

“Will.” he smiles “Do you know how long that much flesh would take to cook properly?”

“I know. The work-load would be a murder.”

“And that comment was in extremely bad taste.”

Will has obviously ingested a little more alcohol than he gave himself credit for. His head has begun to swim from a combination of stress and tiredness. Meeting Jack Crawford again is going to disrupt his sleep schedule like nothing else.  
Hannibal had better to be ready to be sleep-pummelled, because Will can already imagine the fresh nightmares the stress with create, and the old ones which will be dredged up. 

Still, who knows when they will have a chance to speak so freely? Chiyoh may be in fact only pretending to sleep, but at least Will feels more relaxed, if it is indeed a charade.  
They have their chance. They have a little time, and they should use it well.

“In all seriousness,” says Hannibal, just before Will can say something of a similar effect himself “I doubt Bedelia will be dissuaded from her pursuit of my favour by anything short of death.”

Will shrugs “So we kill her.”

The silence could be cut with a knife. A very blunt knife at that, since it is that kind of soft, pregnant silence that could lead to any number of things being said. Some which will be sorely regretted and others which might lay a problem to rest once and for all.

“Hannibal.”

“Yes.”

“Would you want to kill Bedelia?”

It seems so strange to Will that after four years of living like this; his partner in life first and his crimes second, that he still must ask for something like permission to kill.   
For this one possible murder, at least. With the exception of the figures from their past, Hannibal has no qualms about killing this person, or that person. The rest of the human race is only so much livestock to his mind.

But there are those that have proven themselves to Hannibal. Even if they have only proven themselves to be a nuisance, if he has taken an interest, then Will’s husband feels a certain level of responsibility to the people that have captured and held his attention.

Will was wrong to suggest discarding Bedelia as if she were anyone as simple as that girl they killed most recently- Susan something, the one who left her brother under the bridge.

“Yes. I do.”

Will allows himself to relax “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have suggested it so…so brashly, like that.”

Shaking his head, Hannibal takes Will’s hand and squeezes it briefly, before returning his own to the steering wheel and turning off into the woods “It’s quite alright, dear. It’s been a busy night for both of us.”

“Yes. Mostly you.”

He smiles in a way that makes Will’s insides turn to goo “Surely you’re not going to blame me for everything, are you?”

“If you won’t accept the credit, then I guess we can say it was me who cornered Jack.”

“Oh, that was team work. A beautifully executed piece of teamwork.”

Bach’s piece finishes with a big, shrill blast from the organs that, frankly, the musician would have done better without, and flows into Faure’s ‘Angus Dei’.   
Just about right for driving through a dark woods, when discussing the logistics of the murder of an old flame.

Will is about to voice his little observation when Hannibal hits the brakes. The stop is not abrupt, or swift enough to cause him to lose control of the car. They barely even drift as they stop, and draw level with a woman in the middle of the road who is totally under-dressed for the weather.

Since she is on Will’s side, Will rolls down his window to address her “Margot?”

A dog springs out of nowhere and licks his face excitedly.

“And Girl too,” adds Hannibal “What’s going on, Margot?”

Margot’s expression is dark, but not afraid. She lifts her arm rigidly and points to the side the road, where a figure is crumpled in the banks of snow that have been swept to the side.

“We had an unexpected visitor,” says Margot “Don’t worry. I played hostess.”


	22. The next couple

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But wait, you cry, who did Margot catch on the grounds? And who took the other missing girl? And why are you just throwing another Doe and Crawford chapter at us?! We want Hannigram, dammit!, the audience continues.
> 
> All I can say to this is, patience, my dears. The next chapter is entitled 'This is my design', if that makes the wait between this chapter and the next somewhat worth it.

Two days after the opening of the exhibition in the gallery, Carter Carter is walking home with a bag of groceries and a few bags of seed for the stray chickens that have taken up residence in the derelict shed at the bottom of his garden, passes through a small grove of snow-laden trees that serves as short-cut between his home and the grocery store, and comes upon what he first registers as an incredibly late bloom of strawberries.

Strawberries, he thinks, because in the spring and early summer, this grove is a favourite spot of the local children to come and pick the fruit from the bushes that grow wild here. He accompanied his son occasionally when Samson was younger and willing to give his father the time of day, and supervised a small, ham-fisted harvest of the biggest berries that would go into jam or ice-cream at home.  
The fact that two girls have gone missing in as many days does not enter his mind at all.

Carter does not consider that he might have walked into a murder scene because he has never had the opportunity to fully appreciate just how much blood the human body contains. What his mind cannot explain, it interprets as something harmless, if a little strange. That amount of sheer red can only be interpreted as the fruit that grows there in the summer, right?

It is not until he steps into the red-bathed clearing and picks out the shape of a white bone sitting in several petal-like layers of its own, peeled flesh that it occurs to Samson to drop what he carries and scream for all he’s worth.

Half an hour later, the local police have descended on the area. Yellow tape lines the place, and stiff plastic cards with different numbers have been laid out to mark the individual pieces of evidence and signs of disturbance.  
So far, they have found a few footprints that look to belong to a small dog, a few strands of black hair tangled in Greg’s fingers (presumably torn from his attacker’s head) and an unusually shaped root that someone mistook for a shoe lying under the snow, but no one has identified as such yet.

Officer Sharon Johansson, Sr., is the first to identify the bodies.

She bends low over the girl of the couple, whose head is turned into the snow, and whose face has been stripped away like a glove, and reels back so suddenly and sharply she falls into another officer who was looking over her shoulder.

“Oh, shit!” she gasps “That’s my son’s babysitter! That’s Cassie Klein! It’s not Callie Jones at all! Which one of you ass-hats said it was Callie Jones?”

The boy beside Cassie Klein is named Greg Shadbolt. It is guessed at by one of the officers on-scene that he was alive to see his girlfriend (a secret one at that, since the Shadbolts are strict Catholics and never would have let him see a Jewish girl , or have a girlfriend at all) being de-gloved of her flesh, and then remained alive for a fair amount of the torture he himself was put through.  
During most of it, going by the rope-burns and ligature marks around his wrists and ankles, he was suspended upside-down from the tree his body lies underneath.

When Agents Crawford and Walker and Special Agent Winston (Zeller had the specially engraved collar sent to Jack on his last birthday, thinking it was hysterical) arrive on scene, they do so just in time to watch one of the officers struggling to regain their grip on the frosted wood.

Jack points “What is that man doing?”

Officer Johansson, of course, materialised out of the crowd to greet them “Oh, Singh? He’s trying to figure out which branch the Shadbolt kid was hung from while the cult tortured him.”

Jack cups a hand to his mouth and calls out to the officer “Take care you don’t fall on the bodies!”

The man frees up an arm to flash Jack a quick thumbs-up, then wriggles back into a straddling position on the wide branch. A pine-cone drops from the topmost branches and bounces off of his turban. 

“Who are the victims, exactly?” asks Tahcawin, pulling a notebook from her coat-pocket and a pen from behind her ear.

“Greg Shadbolt is the boy and Cassie Klein is the girl. They’re fifteen years old…goddamned shame about that, isn’t it?” Johansson’s eyebrows knit in a grimace of pain and disgust “Beautiful kids. Smart kids. Well, Cassie was as dumb as a sack of shit, but she was a real sweetheart. My kids loved her. I don’t know what I’m gonna tell LaToya.”

Jack nods, wondering if he can summon any more sympathy for the dead from his drying well. The way in which the children have been slaughtered? Well, it just looks like the mess that lies discarded on the floor of a meat-packing plant to him, or something similar.  
And it doesn’t help that Greg Shadbolt is a giant of a child, pushing seven feet even though he has only just turned fifteen. He does not look like a child to Jack, what, with his back turned to him, and his spine open and glistening through several wild slashes the bifurcate his shoulder blades. He just looks like a fully grown man that got hit by a train.

Perhaps a train made of knives.

Jack rubs his eyes and gives himself a sharp pinch on the bridge of the nose. He tries to centre himself. He gives up “I wonder if you could clear the crime scene for me, Officer?”

“Clear it.” she repeats uncomprehendingly “Of what?”

“Of officers.”

This is, of course, the moment Officer Singh choses to lose his grip on the precarious tree-branch. He tumbles down and lands gently in a snow-drift at the bottom of the tree, crushing a piece of evidence. After a moment of scuffling and other officers rushing over to save him, Jack hears “Hey, this isn’t a shoe! This is a tree-root!”

Sharon Johansson sticks her hands on her hips and seems to contemplate Jack for a few seconds. She may suspect him of being in league with the cult. If that’s what she thinks is going on, then Jack has to at least give her points for creativity.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

 

It ends up taking the better part of another half hour to get the crime-scene cleared of the police, due in no small part to the fact that Officer Singh sprained his ankle in his fall and needed to be carried away.

Officer Johansson leaves Jack and Tahcawin with their promise to call her as soon as they are done. She made a few vague, nervous offers to stay behind disguised behind general concerns for their safety, but Jack gently rejects all of them.  
Still, she feels she must leave them with one more unnerving comment in parting “As soon as this is done, we need to question a few people. Louise Deauxma-Chiwelte still hasn’t come home, and neither has Calliope Jones. You better keep an eye out for bodies, actually.”

She probably means the last part as a joke; her people have already done a complete and thorough sweep of the surrounding grove, and even now, there are over a half dozen search-parties combing the area.

The timing of these disappearances could not be more frustrating to Jack if he had been a silent witness to them himself. He is at least 90% certain he knows who is responsible for the disappearances- perhaps not both, but at least one of them is the fault of Hannibal and Will.  
Of course it is. Just like Hannibal to challenge Jack, to push his authority and test his patience by exercising some of his own insidious power the moment he’s extracted a blood oath from Jack not to interfere with him or his husband for the duration of the ordeal, unfurling in front of them.

Jack is constantly thinking of that encounter in the museum of torture they had in Italy, and how badly he wishes he had had the strength and agility to complete finish off the bastard there. He could have spared so many families so much grief.  
Including himself.

“What did you do that for, sir, if I might ask?” asks Tahcawin.

He has not yet told her the specifics of the arrangement he made a few nights ago. He does not think he would have the gall to tell her until they were already there.

“One moment, Tahcawin. Let me make a call.”

Jack takes his phone from his pocket and dials a number. When Will gave it to him, he made it clear that the number was not theirs, nor linked to their home in any way. Jack could do all he wanted to trace it and it would never take him a step closer to whatever sanctum of domestic murder those two have built.  
He punches the number in so hard, he hits a few wrong numbers several times and leaves a large, nasty smear of a fingerprint on the screen.

Hannibal picks up after two rings “Yes?”

The moment that cold voice touches his ear, Jack begins a difficult fight with the urge to pitch the phone into the snow “The grove beside Fernvale Road. Don’t bring the car to the site. And move quietly, or you’ll run into the search parties in the woods.”

Jack hangs up before Hannibal can remind him in that infuriatingly cool way of his that both he and Will have helped with the searches. At night, specifically, using their dogs as ad-hoc sniffer dogs until the town’s only actual sniffer dog, a ten-year old gigantic German Shepherd named Heidi, could be brought out of retirement (which is to say, coaxed out of its cushy bed under the secretary’s desk at the station with several scraps of meat donated by the butcher).

For this reason, Jack has made sure he and Tahcawin, and to a lesser extent Winston, are kept busy and engaged with other things while the searches progress.

Jack has had the duty many times of telling people their loved ones are dead. It is not normally one of the things his job entails, except when weird circumstances demand it, such as Beverly Katz’s death.  
This moment reminds Jack of the rush sickening emotions that assuaged him on the doorstep of her parents’ house. Knowing he was going to have to tell them their daughter was dead and sectioned by an insane serial killer, well, not in those exact details, but with that thought on his mind while he tried to make the news gentle, is a startlingly similar experience to the feelings swimming around in his head, knowing he’s going to have to tell Tahcawin the killers, one of whom was responsible for her aunt’s death, are coming to help them with another series of murders?

He would so much rather dig into a snow-drift and hibernate for the rest of the winter.

“Agent Walker, I’m going to tell you something now and you’re not going to like it.”

Tahcawin is alarmed “Alright, sir.”

“When I say you’re not going to like it, I mean you’re going to want to shoot me.”

The ghost of an ironic smile touches her lip “Are you going to tell me you’re the killer, sir?”

“No.”

The smile drops away like a leaf dropping from a tree in the fall “Well if it’s so serious sir, you had better tell me.”

He tells her.

Her mouth opens in disbelief “But they’re dead.”

“They’re not.”

“Yes they are. You were there when they died.”

“I was there to watch Will Graham drag Hannibal Lecter over the cliff, and I was there to find the corpse they left in their wake, but we never found anything in the way of bodies.”

Tahcawin whips off the knitted beanie she borrowed from Jack to keep from freezing, and gestures wildly with it. She seems to have no idea of what to do with her borrowed hat so has to settle for waving it around for dramatic emphasis.  
Jack has never wanted to laugh harder at someone else’s way of panicking. Looks like some kind of interpretative dance.

“What makes you think you can trust them?”

Jack snorts messily, and wipes up what comes out of his nose on a Kleenex before Tahcawin can notice the embarrassing mistake “Trust them? No, I don’t trust them, and they don’t trust me. There is no love lost between those men and I.”

“They probably committed half of the murders themselves!” groans Tahcawin “This is, sir, if you will permit me to speak my mind, fucking bat-shit bonkers crazy! This is ridiculous! This is just a bad, bad idea!”

“You don’t have to like the idea, Tahcawin. Do you know how old I am?”

“No. No sir, I don’t.”

“I won’t give you an exact number, but I will tell you I’ve been in the police force for longer than you have been alive. And I have prior experience with these men.”

“But I read about these men,” she protests “I read your reports on Lecter’s crimes. You always talk about how unpredictable he was.”

“Hannibal is predictable in his unpredictability.” says Jack “He…well, think of him like a snake. Snakes coil when they are ready to strike, but Hannibal doesn’t. Keep your eye on him when it seems like he is least likely to make for your throat. Will Graham…I don’t know what Will Graham is.”

Tahcawin looks up at him, her eyes fearful “I thought he was resisting him to the end.”

“They’re married now.”

She swallows with some difficulty.

“You don’t have to be here.”

Tahcawin shakes her head “Yes I do, sir, this is my job.”

“And…and I know this is a lot to ask, but will you hand me your gun?”

“You think I’m going to shoot them on sight?”

“It’s what I would do if I were you.”

She hands over her gun, which Jack unloads and slips into his pocket.

A few moments pass in a stiff and awkward silence. The bodies lay uncovered in the snow, growing more and more entrenched in the snow and ice as the moments pass. Really, Jack should have let Officer Johansson take the bodies.  
The freezing is going to make the bodies difficult to examine for evidence, but if the last killings are anything to go by, then there’s about as much sense in looking for evidence on the bodies as there is in looking for an electrical outlet in a tree. It just isn’t there.

“I overhead the officers. Sounds like they’re finally closing down the schools.” says Tahcawin after what seems like a very long time “I have to wonder why they waited for so long to do this in the first place.”

“Fear.”

“Fear of what would happen?”

“No. They don’t want to scare the town any more than they’re already scared. Still, it’s a good thing the schools are finally shutting down…they really should have closed them after the first killings. I suspect the murderers pick a lot of their couples at the high-school.”

Tahcawin scowls darkly. The shift of the light makes her face look old beyond her year “You’re desperate, aren’t you sir?”

Jack doesn’t respond. Tahcawin the good sense to remain quiet too.

After a few moments of this terse, tense silence, Winston’s ears perk up. Previously, he was sniffing around the crime scene contentedly, listening to Jack’s admonishments every time he strayed dangerously close to the corpses. But now, he has completely lost interest in sniffing around the dead bodies.  
His nose twitches, catching a scent he has not smelled in years, but has apparently always remembered.

He was a three-year old dog the last time he smelled that scent, and now, at seven years old, he seems to become that energetic, bouncing, over-excited dog Jack brought into his home. The age melts off of him. His movements are springing and young again as he lollops into the forest, kicking up so much snow he obscures himself completely from Jack’s vision.

Jack considers whistling for him. Then dismisses the idea completely; Will is going to win this battle. He was Winston’s first owner, and therefore, his first father. Jack’s just kind of the adoptive dad battling against that obnoxious biological bond that can sometimes pull families-by-blood a little tighter together.

“What got into Winston?” asks Tahcawin anxiously “You told me he doesn’t chase birds anymore.”

“Did I ever tell you where I got Winston from?”

Realisation passes across her face, and lips twist up into another grimace “A rescue dog, huh?” she repeats bitterly.

“I rescued him from a total lack of ownership.”

“Wasn’t Will living with a wife and a step-son when he died? When he staged his death anyway.”

Jack’s eyes are trained on the edge of the clearing. Any minute, a set of familiar shapes will appear out of the woods.  
Like the shadows that have always followed him, clinging to his own, crawling into his ear to sit in the canal and whisper awful things about his life and his world and how terribly, insidiously small it was becoming between semi-retirement and becoming the equivalent of a gigolo of the FBI for Purnell. 

He can hear Winston’s barks and whines receding into the near-distance. They have yet to be answered.

“Molly. Her name was Molly. The son’s name escapes me, but neither of them could really forgive Will for bringing the Dragon down on him. That was their logic, not mine. He went out of his way to protect them. Maybe it was just acting. A disguise. If it was a disguise he wanted, then he had training in making them from the master of disguise, I’m sure. They were going to move away.”

“The Dragon attacked them in their own home,” adds Tahcawin “To get at Will, but the wife, Molly, she got herself and her son out intact.”

Jack nods “No way were they going to stay in the house where it all happened. Molly must have wanted to move away from the memories of Will. I suppose they became painful after his death.”

“His alleged death.” corrects Tahcawin.

It feels strange and refreshing to be sharing this little inconsistency in the truth with someone else. Especially someone who is still young and passionate enough to be as angry as he is, just through the pure power of youth, rather than fuelling her anger with a reservoir of bitterness that has been slowly filling since the first time she put on her uniform.

Jack hasn’t thought seriously about Molly or her son (it’s got to be Wilfred or Walt) in a long time either, although he can remember the day he picked up Winston quite clearly.

“The dogs weren’t going with them. They were going into care. I took Winston for myself because I thought he had earned something more than languishing in a pound. And I was right. He’s an amazing dog.”

Molly and Wilfred or Walter were packing the car with the dogs, ready to drop them off at the vet to be distributed in shelters across the country. The son wept at the thought of splitting up to dog’s pack and losing the companions which had kept him safe, piled into his bed and given him fleas. Molly, on the other hand, seemed to be letting go of a heavy burden by letting go of her dogs.

His dogs.

His dog, in particular.

Winston sat on his haunches in front of the car, looking disgruntled and depressed. He sprang up when he saw Jack and licked the creases from his slacks, also shedding a good half-pound of fur on his shoes and coat in the process.

Jack had come by out of a sense of duty (and a desire to see some familiar faces, however remote their familiarity actually was) to wish them well. But when he looked at Winston, flashing that doggy grin he has become famous for among the dog-walking circle in Boston, the words changed in his mouth to: “I’ll take him home with me, if you want.”

Winston probably saved Jack from a deeper depression than his doctor has diagnosed him with. Something about having a furry, slobbering critter completely devotedly in love with him has kept his spirits up- or, at least, kept his head above the water when things were truly dire inside his head. Also, walking Winston has kept his waist-line from the rapid expansion several veteran agents he knew assured him was on the way.

There’s another thing to add to the bitterness about seeing Will again; the man’s going to steal his dog.

“Fucker.” breathes Jack.

Tahcawin shoots him an odd look “Say again? I missed that.”

“Nothing.”

A boot crunches in the snow. A voice exclaims in a mixture of elation and surprise.

“Here they are.” says Jack.

He slips a hand into his pocket almost unconsciously, and grips the butt of the gun he confiscated from his partner.


	23. This is my (our) design

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's too hot to be alive right now, so I have left my body and become an translucent, yet perfectly corporeal spirit to avoid the humidity. Also, I've been hitting the study books so hard I just answered to the name 'Chairman Mao' when my own name didn't work (Guess which era of Chinese politics I've been studying) and my kittens are hogging the fan in my room. There's a python somewhere in my backyard, and it absolutely refuses to rain even though there are giant fucking clouds hanging over us at all hours.  
> Meanwhile, I'm writing about snow and ice and bitter cold. I would literally kill a person to trade places with Murder Husbands in their snowy little berg right now.

I see them. 

Two of them, holding hands. Their breath steams in the air. She wears a long trench-coat so she can turn up the collar and conceal herself, should anyone who might take note of their being together pass by. He wears a shorter, thicker jacket to keep the cold at bay.

They are in love, obviously, or at least they think they are in love and do not make an effort to hide this when they think they are alone.   
I can see this. The others with me can see this as well, but I am especially offended by it.

Perhaps I am invested in one of the two. Either with unrequited affection, which would enrage me, now that I see why my affections are not returned, or with a fierce grudge, which I feel empowers me, because I now know how to harm the one who has incurred my wrath.

They walk into the grove, nervous of their fragile privacy. We follow. We are not seen for the first few minutes, until a twig snaps under a boot (not my boot) several dozen feet from where the bodies will fall.  
The shoe’s size is a woman’s seven, without a brand or a seal on the bottom to indicate the make. I am angry with my female companion for giving us away like this, but I am also thrilled by the thought of a chase.

So I go first. I take the first steps and am closest when they start to scream. 

My anger is clear, now. It is not affection I feel for either of them, but anger, specifically aimed at Greg Shadbolt, for daring to think he might have a relationship behind his parents’ back while I do not.   
I catch Greg first.

Cassie Klein doubles back to help him, but thinks the better of it when she sees the size of the knife in my hand. At least eleven centimetres long. Built thin, to kill quietly and quickly. This is not how I intend to use the weapon.

My first strike perforates Greg’s left lung. His blood sprays out across two feet of snow and speckles Cassie Klein even at her increasing distance. Blood fills his mouth and he drops to the floor, but I am not finished. While he trembles on all fours, I begin to stab his back.   
Two strikes above the shoulder-blades, cleaving nerves and exposing his spine, and three strikes along the vertebrae, knocking them out of alignment. I take one as a trophy later, when I have finished.

My companions pursue Cassie Klein. Another of us has gone back to sweep away the bulk of our footprints. They leave me with Greg Shadbolt, but I am still not finished.

I throw a rope over a nearby branch and tie it underneath Greg’s arms, without concern for proper support. I do not intend to keep him up there for long, but it is long enough to leave substantial rope burns as he strains and convulses against them in his death-throes.  
With the same knife that perforated his lung and destroyed most of his spine, I make small cuts and pull away circles of skin, attached to the tip of the knife, by twisting the knife point on the skin in the manner of a cork-screw.

They bring Cassie Klein back. 

 

I am another, now. Perhaps the woman or the girl who has left the only surviving boot-print. 

I am, in fact, not angry. I am spurned.   
Cassie Klein is the one who has spurned me and I am not yet recovered from it, so the wound must be recent, or one that was vicious enough to fester for a great deal of time. 

My companion has strung Greg Shadbolt up. Because I know it will cause her a great deal of pain and really drive my point home, I put a knife to Cassie’s throat and make her watch until Greg dies. His blood pools, puddles, and sinks into the snow. I take a fistful of the red snow and rub her face with it.

Cassie screams. Cassie fights back against me, and I fight back against her, far more successfully. Her defensive wounds will be impressive, and speak of a primal determination to survive me.

Even as I act, a crushing guilt makes my movements heavy and clumsy. This murder was planned, but the guilt that would come with it is something I did not account for. I do not want to look at her. I do not want her to look at me as she dies, so I take the tip of the knife and start peeling from the bottom of the jaw.   
The skin of her face, from temples to chin, eventually comes away in my hand. I place this next to her, absolved of my guilt.

The body of Greg Shadbolt is lowered to the ground and stretched out beside his girlfriend’s. The couple lie composed, hands at their sides, lying on their backs, with their faces titled up towards the night sky. Even the de-gloved face that lies next to Cassie.

They appear to have died in a moment of peaceful, intimate repose.

This is our design.

 

Will Graham opens his eyes. Meeting his stare are the glassy, frost-glazed eyes of the boy, and the bulging, marble-shaped eyes of the girl, stripped of their eyelids and lashes.

Hannibal places a hand on his shoulder “Will?”

Will nods “I’m done.”

“Are you alright?” his husband turns him to face him, looking him up and down for signs of distress “You don’t look well.”

Massaging his left temple, Will blinks, hard, to banish the last of the blood that lingers on his hands from the reconstruction. When he meets Hannibal’s eyes, he does so without hesitation or reserve.

“I’m fine.”

His husband nods, and says nothing more on the subject.

Jack Crawford and his side-kick, a tall woman with shiny black hair and a trembling hands (which may or may not be Hannibal’s fault) called Tahcawin Walker, who Hannibal immediately identified to Will as Miriam Lass’s niece the moment they were out of earshot.  
Neither Jack nor Tahcawin were happy about leaving the scene of the crime- Tahcawin was vehemently unhappy about it, and used a great deal of foul language in several languages when they first asked- but in the end, out of a combination of frustration at themselves for being unable to solve the crime and fear of watching Will doing his empathy-magic, they left them in peace.

It hurt Will’s heart a little bit when Winston got up and trotted after Jack as they retreated, although the dog did throw frequent glances black and grinned his doggy grin every time he did so.

Out of the many things Will has successfully predicted about the direction Jack’s life would go with his greatest failure hanging over his head (and he could tell he was right about most of them; the bitterness, the self-imposed exile and the scathing pessimism, just by looking at his old employer). The one thing he never could have even conceived as a possibility was that Winston might somehow make his way from the dog pack Molly and his stepson would surely split up as they moved away to following Jack Crawford’s polished heels.

How the fuck did that happen?

Perhaps it is the only thing which makes Will feel positive towards Jack at the moment. Seeing his dog, brought all the way out regardless of the energy and cost it will take to care for him on this trip, ad clearly enjoying and loving his second owner.  
Jack may not know how to treat his subordinates humanely, but he sure knows how to treat a dog with the affection and respect their companionship merits.

When they get back to the agents, the dogs are playing, completely unaware of the seriousness of the situation.  
Girl is trying to play, at least. She bounds forwards and backwards practically on the spot, trying to elicit a response from Winston. The older dog sits on his haunches and watches her lazily, with something like canine amusement. Actaeon has grown tired of waiting for his friends to start being fun and makes up for this by chasing his own tail, yipping furiously at the infuriating scrap of fur at the edge of his vision that evades his capture.

Hannibal whistles for Actaeon. The dog pauses in mid-yip and charges over, kicking up sprays of snow as he goes.  
The agents are nowhere near as pleased to see them back.

“What did you find?” asks Jack- straight to the point, then, which is also what Will would prefer to do.

“There are a lot of them, but there were two committing the murders. One for each. The others just watched.”

Tahcawin’s face crumples into a scowl “Oh, and you know this how?”

Jack shakes his head “He knows things, Agent Walker. If you want to argue with him about his morals then I won’t stop you there, but there’s nothing to be gained from challenging his ability to reconstruct.”

“How strange it is, Jack, to hear you discussing my husband’s ability as if it were nothing you could exploit,” says Hannibal with a stiff little smile “It is rather unprecedented, actually.”

Will shoots him a significant look. A ‘please, just behave yourself’ look. Hannibal does not seem abashed or prepared to listen.  
He’s mad, apparently, which isn’t a thing Will is used to seeing. Still, he doesn’t blame Hannibal for being mad. Jack is kind of throwing a wrench in their plans to lay low throughout the ordeal with the cult. Not that he is the first two. Two days earlier, a substantially larger wrench was thrown into that plan.

While Actaeon circles Hannibal’s legs and Winston pads over to give Will a lick on the palm, Will relays the most important information he gleaned about the murders. It takes a half minute at most, and then it’s time to move on to the profile.

For a few seconds, he is concerned he won’t be able to speak properly. That his tongue might swell to twice its normal size and dribble sideways out of his mouth, the way it used to when he ate peanut butter as a child (thank God he out-grew that allergy, or he’d have to learn to make something other than PBJ sandwiches for a quick lunch).  
Unfortunately, his voice comes out perfectly clearly.

“What you’re looking for is a group of outsiders who are not willing to present themselves as outsiders to this society. They probably weren’t conscious of being outsiders until they joined the cult and baited each other into these murders, but each of them is going to have something that divides them from the rest of their society. Think anger problems, severe anxiety that has gone completely untreated and -”

“Good old psychopathy.” guesses Jack, staring at Hannibal.

“Yes,” says Will, already losing his patience “And repressed guilt. They’re going to be young and enjoying a pack mentality from ‘fitting in’ with this group of other violent social deviants. The guilt is there…it’s just not a very prominent thought in their conscious minds. The subconscious, on the other hand, is going to be tortured. You’re looking for individuals from privileged backgrounds. Financially comfortable. If there are two parents, the marriage is likely to be intact.”

In spite of herself, Tahcawin has gotten invested in what Will has to say “So you think we’re looking for kids?”

“Yes. High-school aged or older. No older than their early twenties, though, and if I had to hazard a guess I would say a twenty-something is in charge. The younger ones will submit their classmates for scrutiny, and if the relationship they’re in seems a little too rewarding the Hand of Jophiel steps in to let them know it.”

Will feels the inescapable presence of the corpses behind him, like eyes crawling up his back. Funny how he’s fine with standing over his own victims, but standing even a hundred feet from someone else’s still sets his teeth on edge and sends rashes of goose-bumps up his arms.

Unconsciously, he steps a little closer to Hannibal. 

Hannibal takes this little shift as his cue to add his two cents “Do you find it difficult to believe children are capable of killing other children, Agent Walker?”

She grows visibly uncomfortable and seems to shrink back in on herself “No. No, I don’t.”

“I’m afraid I am struggling with this a little, myself.”

She is surprised “Oh, yeah?”

“Even a creature such as me has boundaries to observe and respect. I have never enjoyed killing children.”

Will wonders why Hannibal is using this particular brand of his famous verbal flirtation to coax a little more of the character of Tahcawin Walker out. Wouldn’t it be more simple if he just started a monologue about his murders, and then observed how far she could be pushed before she snapped and dove for the gun Jack confiscated from her (which Jack thinks he hasn’t noticed, but there is only one thing Jack Crawford would squeeze so hard that his knuckles pop inside his pocket, and his gun is sitting snugly in its holster)?

Hannibal must not feel like being a simple, transparent killer today. Something has him riled up.

“You killed children?” she repeats incredulously “When?”

“One of his Shrike killings. A seventeen or eighteen year old girl. Abigail Hobbs too.”

Jack seems to be watching Will for the slightest twitch at the mention of her name. Will doesn’t so much as blink.

“I take it you have read my file?”

Tahcawin swallows with difficulty. If Will had been told Tahcawin had something like asthma, he would believe her on the verge of an attack.

“Yes.” she manages “It was thick.”

Hannibal seems satisfied by this. That’s enough baiting of the agents for today, Will decides, and takes back the focus of the conversation “I know you’ve been questioning some of the high-school students already.”

“University too.”

Will nods “Good. Expand that line of questioning in particular. I would be surprised if the Hand was mainly composed of college students, but it is always possible they are picking from a pool of victims of another generation to disguise themselves, and hide their activities better from their peers. And while you’re on those high-school students, you better investigate each and every one of them that looks like they’ve got something strange going on at home.”

Jack’s face darkens to a deep scowl of irritation “Strange seems to be the normal state of affairs in your berg, Will.”

As if to drive the accusation home, a few chickens flap desperately overhead, clucking and rustling out of sight as quickly as they came.

 

Bedelia du Maurier slouches in her chair on the balcony, contemplating the events that led her to this state of affairs.

Bedelia was a woman who was proud of her external appearance, though not dependent on it or devoted to it as some of her female colleagues and acquaintances were. For them, style and fashion and just generally making themselves appealing to the critical audiences became as much of a career as their medical degrees and tenures.   
Bedelia only bought into that as much as she had to. A certain level of attractiveness and classiness was expected from her, due to her genitalia and the way people with her genitalia are thought of in serious working environments. 

It is all well and good for a man to walk into his office with slightly tousled hair and greasy skin, and to be wearing the bags of a hard night of partying under his eyes. This is allowed. This is accepted. And it is all well and good for a male eccentric to come into his working environment in socks and sandals, but if a woman tried that?  
Hell no. 

Laughed out of the building. 

Bedelia wonders what might happen if she attempted to return to some of her old haunts, looking the way she does now.   
It is obvious there is something wrong with her, the physical damage aside. Her face has not yet found an efficient way of both maintaining shape and producing an expression that communicates her disdain for the world around her and the people that inhabit it, but people still get the gist. Her eyes are still incredibly expressive.

Were she to try to go home, say, back to the private college she spent what she is inclined to think of as the best (the freest, at least, as those were the years pre-dating Hannibal Lecter’s insidious charm) of her life so far…  
Well, the result would be something like Quasimodo strolling into Versailles, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a few daggers clenched between his odd buck-teeth.

The wind is harsh today. Not the freezing cold that blows down from the Artic circle that rattled the house yesterday and could not be prevented from seeping through the windowpanes, no matter how many rags Liezel bunched up against the sills.   
A lighter, less offensive cold. Made to irritate rather than kill.

When turned against it, Bedelia’s face feels more like old, sun-bleached leather than usual.

She had Liezel park her chair out here almost an hour ago. Liezel will be hovering around on this same floor, waiting for her cue to retrieve her boss. It won’t be any time soon, as far as Bedelia is concerned. She has thought suicide in this manner several times; freezing herself to death on one of the truly sub-Arctic days, but Liezel always bundles her up far too well for that to be a danger, and the weather isn’t cold enough to do the job of finishing her off today.

So, she is left with nothing to do but to wait.  
And to wonder when the hell Hannibal will accept her invitation and advances. If he doesn’t respond soon, she’s going to be forced to do something else. Something a little more dramatic.

 

By the time Will and Hannibal arrive home, Chiyoh and Margot are extremely agitated.

In spite of being the one who pushed her bastard brother’s head underwater and held him there while the eel pushed itself down his throat, Margot appears incredibly skittish about holding a person captive. Perhaps the fact that it is a young girl reminds her too much of her own years of captivity on Muskrat farm. Perhaps it is the fact that the girl is still what some might consider a child, in need of her support and protection rather than her vigilance so she doesn’t escape.

Or perhaps it is the discovery of the fact that Hannibal has an honest-to-God torture den in his dungeon. Not one of those draughty, medieval things like the one Chiyoh guarded for years; a far more modern, clean and comfortable cousin to those old, sewage-smelling things.   
Kind of like an artist’s studio, in fact.   
The tools of his craft do cover almost every available surface.

While waiting for the two of them to get back from harassing/cooperating with Jack Crawford, Margot has had ample time to explore the contents of the work-benches and the shelves.  
She has figured out the girl, laying drugged in the lone, small cell in the room, has been knocked out with one of the phials of drugs that are stocked in one particular shelf.  
Here, there are narcotics, hallucinogens, poisons and various concoctions made to knock people out in ten seconds flat, or less, depending on the dosage.

Margot can’t imagine how he gets such a supply without arousing suspicion in the town. Wouldn’t they notice if the director of their art museum was buying drugs in quantities sufficient to knock out and kill an elephant?  
Then again, if Hannibal wasn’t smart enough to not shit where he eats then he would have been caught a long, long time ago, long before he ever had a chance to meet Will Graham.

While Margot explores and swings a few scalpels experimentally, Chiyoh sits with her back to the wall, and her arms folded over her stomach tightly. Her wound has healed well. Chiyoh does not seem to have realised this.  
Each of her movements are slow, pained and torturous to observe. Margot has begun to wonder if their desperate trek across the country in the dead of winter might have damaged her in some way Margot cannot gauge or judge.

When the door swings open at the top of the stairs, Margot nearly jumps out of her skin. She was so absorbed in staring at a bottle of ricin salt (what use does a man who keeps his prey alive for days have for a deadly poison such as this have for an insta-killer like ricin?) she did not hear them coming, nor sense the pervasive presence of the two murderers she is now aware of spilling into the room.

Moving like some kind of tide. A tide contaminated by crude oil and things drowned within it.   
Margot shudders, and returns the bottle to the shelf.

“She’s still out?” asks Will, rather redundantly.

The girl is sprawled out on the floor like no conscious person would be. Margot once suggested going inside the cell briefly to correct her position, so the girl wouldn’t wake up with a terrible crick in her neck and legs from sleeping at such a weird ankle.  
To this, Chiyoh told her very frankly, a crick in the neck and aches in the leg were going to be the least of the girl’s problems when she came to.

“That girl hasn’t moved an inch.” Margot confirms “Are you sure you didn’t kill her?”

“She is alive.” says Chiyoh softly “She still breathes.”

Will gives her an odd look and shuffles to the other side of the room. Meanwhile, Hannibal is still at the top of the stairs. She can hear him, speaking in his native tongue, trying to persuade the dogs not to follow him down into his little kingdom.

Exasperated (or as close as Hannibal can get to that), he calls down to Will “Would you be a dear and pass me up a bone or two? The dogs are determined to come down.”

“And shed all over your human remains.” concludes Will with a touch of humour.

Their interaction is somehow so intimate and private, even in a room with two other people and another totally knocked out, that Margot feels as if she should not have witnessed it. Then Will ruins the atmosphere of quiet intimacy, for her anyway, by stooping at a chest and opening it to reveal a jumble of long, human bones. Femurs and a few ribs, if Margot had to guess.

She averts her eyes. The bones make a strangely ceramic noise as Will plucks two from the chest and walks them up to Hannibal.

Makes sense that they should give their dogs human marrow to chew on when they will not settle down.  
Margot used to feed her horses brown sugar cubes and huge apples from the local farmer’s market, going without so her animals could eat their fill. Nothing is too good for the animals in a person’s life, after all.

With the dogs placated and directed to the kitchen to chew their prizes, Hannibal descends the stairs. He plants himself in front of the cell where the girl lies and just stares.

Margot never visited him while he was imprisoned under her wife’s lock and key. If she had, it would have been to thank him for the unusual way he had helped their family. With the slaughter he left behind him and Will, and his capture immediately afterwards, it was a simple task to play the broken victim.  
Considering what Mason planted in the pig for her, she was a broken victim at the time anyway. Just shaken from an entirely different incident.

Before the police came, Alana did away with the evidence of the surrogate pig. She tossed the body outside and scattered the equipment around the house, so it became nothing more than some of the weird memorabilia Mason Verger kept on the grounds- most of which was medical or medieval in some way.  
And as for the corpse of Margot’s half-formed child, it was buried in the back-yard beneath a rose-bush they planted a few weeks later, after the noise about the scandal had died down a little bit. 

Had Margot visited Hannibal in prison, she would have likely brought a rose to put in a vase in front of his cell. Alana thinks of him as nothing more than a clever monster. Their relationship was one of student and teacher, then, briefly, lovers, and Margot cannot blame her for feeling betrayed.

Margot, on the other hand, has lived the vast majority of her life in the company of monsters. Some are far more tolerable than others.   
Hannibal is by far the most pleasant monster she has ever met. 

But, she is reminded, of course, by him in front of the cell that there was a reason he was once behind the glass.  
That reason is splayed out on the floor forming a crick in her neck that’s going to be agonising by the time she comes around.

Will goes to his husband’s side “If she’s going to wake up today, she’s going to need some help from adrenalin.” he notes.

“The stuff has almost lost its potency. We could be patient.”

They then exchange a knowing smile, and it is Hannibal’s turn to fetch the thing they need. Which turns out to be a syringe. Filled with adrenalin, if Margot had to guess.  
She is by no means certain of what they have been injecting the girl with to keep her unconscious for the past two days. All she knows is that it has worked fantastically, without fault, and kept her drooling and prone on the floor, at that awkward angle Margot longs to correct. Hannibal knows his drugs.

He did a fantastic job keeping Miriam Lass, Tahcawin’s aunt, as Margot discovered for them (on the run or not, she still has connections in high places), in a drug-induced haze for close to three years.  
However, Margot has no reason to think this girl should last so long.

Being the medical doctor of the two, Hannibal is the one who opens the cell door, wide, and turns the girl onto her back. Margot feels a twinge of relief; that pose was really getting on her nerves, just to have to see.  
He injects her somewhere in the upper-arm, close to the heart but not too close, so as to get her moving more quickly while not over-loading her heart and killing her off in the process. They need to ask some questions before they do that.

As soon as he has finished, Hannibal leaves the cell and closes it tightly again. An unseen lock clicks.

“How did you put all this together in four years?” asks Margot, tapping the phial of ricin salt on her hip “You are resourceful men, but this is….this is some impressive renovations work to complete in four years without arousing suspicion.”

“This was already here.” says Will.

“Run that one by me again.”

He grows irritable “It was already here. You think a man goes around eating people without some safe-houses prepared?”

Margot blinks “Well, no.” she looks to Hannibal for an explanation “What made you pick this town? I’ll give you that it’s a lot more cosmopolitan that most back-water bergs,” she pauses, thinking of a transcendently beautiful woman she saw in a store-front, wearing both an apron and the full burqa without a sign of discomfort “And the art museum is really something else, but if you wanted low-profile, why didn’t you just move out of the country?”

“I did not wish to leave this country. Europe is my ancestral home, only.”

From the dark look that Chiyoh flicks his way, then Will’s, Margot guesses Hannibal’s true reasons for steering clear of Europe have more to do with what he wishes to avoid rather than what he wants to be immersed in.

Margot has had the American experience. She has gone over the pond and had the European experience. She knows which of the two she prefers, but also, that she and her family might not have left had they not feared Hannibal would show up on the doorstep one day.  
For the son and the wife he promised to take from Alana.

That reminds her; she better start pressing them a little harder to get through with this cult business so they can go to Bedelia, already.

In the cell, there is a twitch. Slow, at first, then frantic and fast, graduating into a full spasm.

The girl inside the cell thrashes her arms until she has managed to roll over onto one side, then forces herself upright, her palms braced against the rough stone.

She looks up at them through a curtain of blonde hair, made stringy by going unwashed for several days.

“Am I having a heart attack?” rasps Calliope Jones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was Will's magic. Bit different, since he was sniffing out two killers, but I hope it didn't disappoint.


	24. "Kalakutpisa", and other choice words

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pardon the delay. I've been horrifically sick all weekend and had to push myself to meet two school deadlines at the same time, so that was about as fun as being punched in the face with a wrecking ball. On the bright side, I did go through and fix some consistency errors. Alas, it is only me, no beta. So if any of you happen to notice mistake, lemme know where and when and I will leap on it. 
> 
> (and, yes, I did purposefully miss out 'a' in the phrase 'notice a mistake'. Just keeping you on your toes, folks)

The moment Will saw who it was Margot had knocked out and left sprawled on the front porch, a trickle of blood running from the back of their dented head to drip between the floorboards, he knew what had happened.

Calliope Jones, with the necklines that seem to plunge a few extra metres every time he walked into a room, was going to do something terrible.  
Terrible from Will’s perspective, anyway. Adultery is no longer the great Biblical sin was once in this society, nor is it a great sin from Will’s point of view. Still, Calliope has done something heinous in trying to make herself welcome in Will’s bed.

At no point did he give her his trust. What he gave her was time and attention. No more than was appropriate for a teacher and student relationship at a university level. 

At no point did he indicate he was interested in her as anything more than a frustratingly average student in one of the classes he has been taking, to help a sick colleague.  
And somehow, despite being in her twenties and therefore at least a little more mature than a love-sick teenager, she interprets the five (and Will has counted) times they have ever met outside of his classroom as the overtures for a romance?

This is just too forward. Too presumptuous. Too invasive.  
Too many of all of the three above that Will isn’t even irked to find one of his students in the cell where Hannibal normally sticks the poor, unlucky bastards he plans to chip away at for a small span of weeks or months, depending.

In fact, he’s not even sure if he wants her to stay in there. Which is not to say he plans to let her go.  
The exact opposite, actually.

It is a problematic situation, to be sure.

“Am I having a heart attack?”  
Her voice is little more than a hoarse croak, thanks to days of neglect. Her eyes are unfocused as well.

Hannibal responds- ready to play the calm and collected doctor, as always. His extensive history in the medical profession makes for the most charming bed-side manner, so it’s difficult for a patient to become upset or offended by him, even when he is graphically describing the way he plans to kill them.

“No, you are not,” he stands in front of the cell, and his expression is one of utter calmness “You are experiencing a surplus of adrenalin. It is not the most pleasant of experiences, is it?”

She barely hears him. Calliope is on her feet now, pacing her cell rapidly, clutching at her chest. She tugs her torn shirt this way and that in an effort to pull away the fiery sensation that boils and crawls underneath her skin. Will, himself, has had a shot of adrenalin wake him up before. Every nerve ending jangles incessantly and buzzes with information that might be pain, or something else entirely, but which the body does not have the time nor the capacity to process.

For all intents and purposes, it is a heart attack of sorts. An arrest of the nervous system, caused by a surge of literal liquid energy.

Wil would feel for her, if he were not already too offended by Calliope’s very reason for being here to be anything but pleased with her discomfort. 

“When does this stop?” she seems to be trying to pull her skin off. Wherever her nails go, they leave large furrows behind them, weeping and dripping on the ground. No one makes an effort to stop her “Make this stop. I think – I think I’m dying. Make this stop. Make me stop dying.”

Hannibal addresses her as a zoo-keeper might address a pacing animal in its enclosure “Be patient. Keep moving. The adrenaline will be finished with you soon. It was not a large dose.” If the animal had recently eaten a limb or two of one of their other zoo-keeper friends.

“She’s not going to die, is she?” asks Margot, more to have something to say than out of any genuine concern.

“No,” says Will “He gave her just enough to wake her up.” he is careful to keep his voice low and his words measured.

In her state of heightened awareness and panic, Calliope has not yet had the time nor the focus to find him in the room. But when she does, the situation is sure to become even more unpleasant than it already is. Will wants to avoid that for as long as possible.

“Margot, what is that in your hands?”

She has a phial cupped in her palms “This? Enough ricin to finish off most of the town.”

Will frowns “Put it back on the shelf, please.”

Margot does so and finds something else interesting in the process “What’s this? Why do you have hydrochloric acid here? Is John Haigh one of your classical inspirations now?”

“I’m going to die!” shouts Calliope.

“You’re not going to die.” snaps Margot “You just have a little bit of adrenalin in your system. God. You haven’t been shot or anything.” 

Calliope’s attention immediately snaps to her. In a flash of stumbling movement, she has pressed herself to the scarred plexiglass and is staring at Margot intently.  
If the attention makes Margot uncomfortable, she does not say so.

“I- you- you and me…you attacked me. We were in the woods and you attacked me.” manages the girl.

“Yep,” says the woman “Trespassing is a serious offence, where I come from. You should count yourself lucky you weren’t shot.”

Calliope’s senses are returning to her. Slowly and spottily, but surely. 

Her first accusation: “You’re Dr Faust.”

Hannibal only nods. He is curious. Will can tell he is anxious to see what she will do next, though he has never taken a special interest in Calliope before.  
Anyone who wanders onto his property with the intention of seducing his hard-won life-partner is fair game, Will supposes.

She points to Margot again, apparently forgetting she has already identified her “And you- I don’t know you, but you hurt me.” 

Calliope’s hand goes up to her head, where the blood still trickles. The wound has scabbed over several times. Each time, Calliope has disturbed it in her drugged-haze, either by scratching at it or thrashing in a feverish fit and smearing the scab along the floor of her cell.  
By now, she has made quite a bloody mess and most certainly infected the wound. Hannibal has chosen not to treat the wound, or acknowledge it.

Even now, she bleeds onto her shoulder. A slick of blood has begun to drip over the dried, flaking trails already made.  
She is stomach-churning to look at. Due in no small part to Will’s general disgust with this girl and her misplaced confidence in her ability to woo married, much older men, who are, for all she knows, not even playing for her team anyway.

Will happens to be playing for both teams, but that is no business of hers.

“I’m bleeding.” she holds up her hand, streaked with fresh, flowing blood “I’m bleeding badly. Help me.”

“I wonder if you could help me first.”

She falls silent.  
Perhaps she has just registered the plexiglass in front of her and is now on her way to realising what this means for her. How much help Dr Faust and her aggressor are likely to offer. 

Then, feeling the chill on his spine, Will realises that is not it at all. She has just seen him.  
And she is working on wrapping her adrenaline-clouded head around his presence.

“Help you.” she repeat “But I’m bleeding. The one bleeding. Me. Is me.”

“I am aware of that,” says Hannibal coolly “But if not for your help I, too, might bleed. Not in the literal sense you understand, but in terms of information. It might start to leak. There are a certain truths you might have uncovered about my husband or myself, and if this is so, I’m afraid I must know exactly which truths these are. Along with who else you might have shared your findings with.”

Really, this is just for Hannibal’s comfort. He and Will have already had a long discussion about Calliope’s intentions and decided she had no plots beyond whatever plot she had concocted to get herself in Will’s pants. Not that Hannibal was pleased to settle on this.  
He would have much rather discovered one intrepid, intelligent student had put names to faces and facts to coincidences none other had so far, and come to blackmail them. Rather their cover of nearly three years being blown, than a girl thinking she could squirm into his marriage and make off with his partner.

However things go for Calliope from this point onwards, they are not going to be easy.  
Quick, perhaps, but easy is definitely off the menu.

“What are you talking about? I don’t know…I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Feeling Chiyoh’s eyes raised to her suddenly, the girl shies away from her, further into the depths of the cell. Her foot splashes into a small puddle of blood that has collected in a dip in the floor. She lets out a weak exclamation of disgust and looks all around for somewhere to hide.  
Something to raise her off of the bloody ground, at least, but there is nothing. The cell has always been utterly unfurnished, but for a drain in the centre to ensure any blood spilt inside would not collect into a lake and make further work difficult or impossible.

Calliope lets out a single, miserable sob. The gravity of her situation has caught up to her all at once “I don’t know what you mean. I promise, I don’t know anything.”

“How can we be sure of that?” interjects Chiyoh.

Hannibal shoots her a side-long look which might be of anger, irritation, gratitude or all of the above. Their eyes do not meet, however.

“What do you mean how can you be sure? You think I’d lie?”

“I think you’ll tell us whatever you can to get yourself out of there faster.”

Chiyoh peels herself from the wall and approaches the front of the cell. Hannibal retreats to Will’s side. At his approach, Margot quickly returns the bottle of acid she was rolling between her palms to the shelf and sticks her hands in her pockets.  
Chiyoh plants herself in front of the cell. Her hands on her hips. Her legs spaced wide apart. Her face turned away, but in the reflection of the red-smudged plexiglass, her eyes burn with a quiet anger. Somehow, Will has the feeling she is looking at him, rather than the cowering girl in the cell.

“I held a man prisoner for many years. He told me many things over those years, and most of it was what he thought I wanted to hear. He believed there were magic words. Magic words to guide my hand to the lock on his prison and unclasp it. Magic words to take him back in time…to the life he lost in the years he spent under my careful watch.”

Calliope snivels.

Chiyoh cocks her head to the side very slightly “But there are no words to undo what you have already done to yourself, do you understand me? There is nothing you can say to sway me. To sway them. Those men are not your museum curator or your teacher. They are not your equals, or even members of the same species. They are alien to you.”

Calliope shakes her head “I know them. They’re nice…they’re nice people. They don’t hurt people.”

For the first time since Will laid eyes on her, Chiyoh sneers. He did not know her face was capable of so human and crude an expression “Did you not hear me? They are not people. They are different from you and I, and they do not play by our rules. Your best chance is to play by theirs and buy yourself some time, if time is what you want. Is it what you want?”

“What?”

“Do you want to die?”

Calliope’s head drops to her knees and her shoulders begin to tremble with quiet sobs.

“I want to go home.” her voice comes from the back of her throat in a high, shrill whine, not unlike the whistle of a steam engine.

“You cannot. You can leave this place, but you cannot go home, so put the idea out of your mind and it will make the remainder of your days here less painful. As will telling them what they want to know.”

“I don’t know what they want to know!” Calliope’s head whips up. She is trying to scream, but her throat is still too hoarse to make proper use of her voice “I don’t know anything!”

Chiyoh responds with a shout of her own “Then why were you coming to this house on foot, if not to be stealthy and silent?”

She points at Will “To see him!”

In the reflection, Will sees Chiyoh’s anger waver into delight for a second. Then she remembers herself and dismisses the idea of an adulterous Will entirely.

“Hannibal.” he speaks barely above a whisper.

“Yes, dear.”

“Put the knife back in your sleeve.”

The knife disappears blade-first into Hannibal’s sleeve. Because he is sure there is a knife in the other sleeve (prior experience), Will takes Hannibal by the hand and heads for the staircase.

“We have something to discuss,” he announces “Chiyoh, keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Am I invited?” asks Margot.

“You are what we are to discuss, I am sure.” replies Hannibal.

Used to be that certain aspects of Will’s train of thought confused him, psychiatric genius though he was. After they fell, though, a rapport, of sorts, opened up. Will likes to think of it as a kind of telepathy. It is incredibly inconvenient to have his glasses delivered to him, when he’s about to raise his voice to announce they are missing.

Margot takes the stairs two at a time and slams the door behind them, cutting off Calliope’s wails. 

“Oh, dammit.” is the first thing Hannibal says “Dammit, Girl.”

Margot frowns “What was that?”

Hannibal spoke in his own language to curse- for some reason, cursing in English just isn’t acceptable to him and his stiff code of etiquette. As a result, Will has learned the most horrific curses in Lithuanian. The other day, he caught himself referring to Jack Crawford as ‘that kalakutpisa’, which made Hannibal snort coffee up his nose. Iced coffee, so the only damage done was to his husband’s pride.

Pointing to the paw-shaped mud stain on the floor, Will says “Girl made a mess again.”

“She’s the messy dog?”

“She is.”

“And you’re the messy husband?”

He squints at her.  
She gestures behind them “The other one moves like he’s on fire when there’s a mess. You just let it sit there and gather dust until it’s problematic. Say, when it has its own ecosystem and the natives have just begun to discover religion.”

“Speaking as one messy spouse to the other?”

Margot rolls her eyes “Alana is terrible. She baptised the whole house with disinfectant when Hieronymus was born, and then again after he got the ‘flu.”

They leave for the living room so Hannibal does not have to suffer the indignity of having Margot watch him on his hands and knees with cleaning supplies. Margot throws herself down on the couch in the living room and puts a pillow over her eyes.

“How long is she staying down there?”

Will shrugs “Not for a very long time.”

“What does that mean? Are you killing her?”

“Yes.”

“She doesn’t deserve to die.”

He could tell her a number of things.  
He could tell her of the eight or so other people that have died since he and his husband set up shop in town, and how little they ‘deserved’ the fates they met. If he is feeling particularly cruel, he could add that Calliope probably could have gotten away with her life if Margot had not taken it upon herself to defend her hosts’ property. The wound Margot dealt her has probably already killed Calliope with the infection; Hannibal has no designs to treat it, and Will has no designs to pressure him to treat it.

If he talked Margot through this, he might help her to understand something about the household she has chosen to hide inside she has missed so far.  
A fundamental, inescapable truth which she has done a brilliant job of ignoring so far.

They are murderers. They are not the kind to go out of their way to help people.  
The only reason she is not dead yet is because she came with Chiyoh and is already known to them from their chequered past. 

“Will.”

He looks over, preparing himself to apologise for ‘spacing out’.

What he sees in her hands makes him pause, and then he says “That’s a lot of ricin. You couldn’t take a small amount and sneak it into our food?”

Margot weighs the phial in her palm “Why do you have these things? I’ve seen you in action. Hannibal is a classic killer. Analog killer, if you will. He does everything with his bare hands and spends hours crafting the murder scene. So why do you have something that kills almost instantly at the right quantities?”

“When you live in pursuit of the kind of past-times Hannibal and I do, you collect certain kinds of memorabilia relating to that past-time.”

She actually snorts “Alright.”

Will decides he better just get straight to the point “She asked you to kill one of us.”

“That she did.”

“Me.”

“You.”

“My body in exchange for your wife and child.”

“And Hannibal would do the rest on his own.” finishes Margot “That was her ransom demand. I never told you the demands she made of me, did I?”

“We weren’t going to ask.”

“You two aren’t afraid of what I might do at all?” she grins in a way she might imagine to be sinister “I’m a desperate woman, Will. Desperate women do things they were not capable of before.”

It is all he can do not to snort in her face, as she did to him “I think I’ll take my chances.”

Margot sighs in and out, each breath deep, speaking of many things which she will not speak of to them “Bedelia is different now. Hannibal is completely confident of his ability to keep on fucking with her head…but there is not much of the ego he was used to destroying now. I saw her. That poison stopped short of killing her. When I say short- let’s think of it in inches. The poison stopped half an inch short from killing her. She wears her face like a Halloween mask. Hannibal killed most of her and what’s left is something he won’t have had a chance to meet yet, since it was buried so deep inside of all that…that classy professional-lady bullshit. As it turns out, she is nearly as crazy as you guys.”

Will sincerely doubts that.  
“Are you after division of labour, Margot?”

The bottle of ricin is balanced on her palm, now. She sways it this way and that, experimenting with how far she can tip the bottle in either direction before it falls “A division of labour? To be honest, I had no idea you and Mr Murder were going to be so popular when I got here. I had it in mind to just whisk the four of us off to Bedelia’s murder enclave, though I still don’t know where that is.”

“I’m sure Chiyoh does.”

“She does, and she is using it as collateral. She guessed Bedelia is after a corpse too, but she doesn’t know me like you do,” she turns and gives Will a sickened, sarcastic smile “Chiyoh thinks I’m a killer. I’m not even close to that, am I? More like a victim of killers, made to join the profession to save myself from becoming another victim.”

“Sure, Margot.”

“The eel killed my brother. Swam right down his throat before Alana and I could finish drowning him.”

Girl bustles into the living room and hops onto the couch, placing her squished head in Will’s lap. She rolls onto her back, her paws raised, and bears her belly expectantly. Obediently, Will scratches.

 

Flora Vicario is leaving her fifth engagement of the week, and second of the night, when Samson Carter materialises at her side.

She does not bother to conceal her discomfort at his sudden arrival. Nor does she attempt to make herself friendly.

Flora tugs at the hem of her skirt, making sure it covers her thighs “What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“I mean what as in what the fuck do you want?”

Samson shrugs “What are you doing?”

“I’m going home.”

“It’s late.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m going home.”

He does not take the hint. Being Samson, he sees the hint, hanging in the air and flashing a variety of neon colours; Flora does not want him there.  
And being Samson, he ignores the hint completely.

They share the sidewalk uneasily. Flora tightens her arms into her sides and slips a hand in her pocket. It closes around her Taser. One of the ‘just in case’ measures she and a lot of the other girls started taking, after Patricia Falcon got pushed too far and too hard by a client, who wouldn’t stop when she said to.  
Has she charged her Taser? She seems to remember sticking the weapon in its charger last night and plucking it up from the charger this morning, but that may be a false memory. Or wishful thinking.

Samson is large. Powerful. So is her right hook, if worse comes to worst and her Taser is dead. 

“I’m just gonna come out with it.” says Samson after a few steps.

Tensing, Flora makes a fist around her weapon.

“Are you sure this is safe?”

In spite of her confusion, she relaxes. Samson’s question is, of course, all kinds of creepy, but she does not get the vibe of an indirect threat.  
Thanks to Roman bragging about his various and extensive conquests in the bedroom, as well as several other Nancy-Drew types putting together a few pieces of a big coincidental puzzle, it is by now well known among the town’s high-school population and a portion of the college that Flora and a few other girls are prostitutes. Their pimp is Roman, and their clientele tend to be the fathers of their classmates.

Mothers, occasionally, and grandparents even more occasionally. Flora’s worst memory of her job is the time she was hired to add some ‘spice’ to the 30th anniversary of an elderly couple. She will never be able to look at old people the same, and, of course, she will never, ever, ever look the same at the grandparents of her friend Liberty.

Roman brags too much, but not enough that it has gotten back to the teachers. Thank God the rest of the school observes a strict code of silence, when it comes to how much the teachers are allowed to know about what goes on behind the students’ closed doors, otherwise Flora would have been shipped out to Colombia to be straightened out by life on her Tia Penelope’s farm.

“Are you threatening me?” she asks, even though she has already decided he is not.

If Samson is offended by her suggestion his face does not show it “No.”

“Then…then why do you…why ask?”

“There are dangerous people around. The Hand. Aren’t you worried?”

Flora scowls and snorts “No! Those motherfuckers only go after couples. I’ve always been single.”

And she always will be, until Roman plucks his head out of his ass and his dick out of another girl long enough to see how much Flora loves him. Then, she’ll give up her job (if Roman doesn’t mind) and maybe they can move out of town together. Get a nice life together. Somewhere she doesn’t have to look at her friends’ fathers and repressed grandmothers, and block out the images of wrinkled dicks and withered tits while she smiles and talks to them nicely.

“Why are you out here?” she demands.

Again, he shrugs “I’ve got no reason to be scared. I’m single too.”

“If you walk this close to me, people might think you’re not interested in being single anymore.”

He puts about a half foot more of distance between them without complaint.

“Take your hands out of your pockets.”

“I’m not armed.” he holds up his empty hands “But I know you got a Taser in there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s glowing through your pocket. Maybe turn it off before you shock yourself.”

Flora looks down to find her Taser is indeed glowing through her pocket. The red light in the side that indicates there are several thousand volts waiting for some skin to conduct it into a nervous system of her choice flashes, garishly and embarrassingly bright.

Carefully, Flora switches it off.

“I carry it when I’m on the job. Just in case.”

He nods “Patricia Falcon got in trouble once, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. Funny you know about that.”

“Everyone knows about what happened to Pat Falcon. And everybody knows who did it.”

Flora’s lip curls automatically at the thought of the man. How she would love to give him a taste of the Taser, now dormant in her pocket “Yeah, but what are you gonna do? No one would believe her.”

They round a corner. Flora’s heart jumps into her throat when she sees a group of five or six people, all huddled in the shadows between the lamplights. They stand in the middle of the street, as if to form a blockade. She cannot see a single one of their faces.  
Then she hears a familiar laugh, and relaxes.

She cups her hands to her mouth and calls “Rosalie!”

A lone figure darts forwards into the puddle of light closest to her and waves “Hey, Flora!” she stops and stumbles over her next greeting “Oh, Samson, too. Hey Samson.”

“Hey Rosalie.”

“What are you guys doing out so late? Hey, guys, it’s fine. We know them. Put your phone away, Yule-May, they’re not the fucking Hand. God. And take 911 off your speed-dial. You make us look so stupid when you do that.”

Rosalie and her (self-named) group, the Weird Sisters, are kind of hard to see in the dark. They are what Rosalie calls ‘classical goth’, who refuse to stray into the territory of pastel or hair-dye that is not white, blood-red or black. The Weird Sisters are not a band or anything- they’re pretty much what the name would suggest.

A bunch of weird girls, all dressed in black, hanging around with each other.  
Flora knows them and likes them well, although she can’t imagine why they think dressing their legs in only fishnets and tiny shorts is a good idea in this kind of winter. Well, scratch that, actually, because Yule-May has on a long black dress with crushed silk sleeves, puffed up like a princess’s, that goes all the way down to her boots.  
She kind of looks like a curtain and definitely sounds like one when she moves.

As they draw closer, Rosalie slings her (bare) arm around the stem of the lamp-post and starts to climb it. She should probably be leaving giant swathes of ripped skin wherever her bare skin touches the freezing metal, but Rosalie is just too cool for that.  
“Are you guys, like, walking home together?”

“No,” says Samson quickly “Just going the same way for a few streets.”

Flora silently thanks him for behaving himself. So many other guys would have said they were headed for his house, for a night of hot sex. Harmless joke or not, Flora has already had her patience stretched thin by her night’s work- waiting for an apologetic business man old enough to be her father, or her father’s significantly older sister, to get it up uses up pretty much all of the patience one has available.

“You are soooo lucky,” Yule-May has a tendency to draw out particular s’s to disguise a slight stutter “I’m, like, really afraid to go home on my own becaus-se I have to walk past the graveyard. I mean, normally, I love the graveyard. It’s like, our place, you know? But now it’s just creepy.”

“We’re passing that place in a few minutes.” remarks Flora, measuring her tone so that she does not accuse Yule-May of being a wimp and coward and several other things while informing her of this “You want to walk with us?”

She shakes her head “We’re gonna stay out for a while longer.”

By now, Rosalie has reached the top of the lamp-post. In triumph, she thrusts her arms into the sky and lets out a short, loud shout of affirmation. Her breath steams. Her silhouette appears long and rakish, stretched out by the strange shadows on the street.

“Wait for me!” she calls “I’m going that way!”

The Weird Sisters give out a groan of disappointment. Without Rosalie there, they will lose their centre of courage. In a few moments they will disperse like the bubbles of sea foam, into houses to spend the night, or into other places where the party might go on for a little while longer.  
Since that weird home-schooled kid and Calliope Jones disappeared, people have been careful.

Speculation says Louise and Callie had a long-time relationship they were keeping a deadly secret from parents and friends alike, for fear of what the age gap would make people say.  
Flora calls bullshit on that. In her mind, both girls and dead, and it probably wasn’t the Hand. She has seen enough of this town (and slept with enough of it, in her line of work) to know someone else might be getting inspired by what the Hand is doing.  
Inspired to act out a few of their own fantasies.

“Are we going or what? I’m freezing. I gotta do some homework too.”

Rosalie says her goodbyes while Flora shifts impatiently from foot-to-foot, and Samson stands as still as a stone pillar in the gentle winds.

The Weird Sisters are still talking happily when they round the corner, so Flora guesses they may stay out a little longer than she thought.

She turns to Rosalie “How are you not freezing?”

Rosalie shrugs “I’m just not cold.”

“Are you some kind of vampire?”

She glowers “Watch it, there, Flory.”

“No, no,” she hastens to correct her mistake “Not like that. Like, vampires are undead, right?”

“So they don’t feel the cold.” finishes Samson. 

Stretching her long, tanned arms out, Rosalie turns her palms up and catches a few snowflakes in each. She crosses her arms and rubs the fragments of snow on her upper-arms, leaving them glistening and wet where she touched them “I can feel the cold. I’m just not that cold. If I get cold, I’ll make Sam give me his jacket.”

Flora laugh “But that’s cruel to Samson.”

“I’m wearing a sweater too. I’ll be fine.”

They walk together for at least two more blocks. Flora no longer feels the compulsion to jump at every unexplained noise and every looming shadow (lamp-posts, more often than not); having Rosalie around makes her feel far more secure than Samson. 

Flora and Rosalie talk about school and bitch out the Chemistry teacher they share. Samson offers little in the way of conversation or presence. A few times, Flora forgets he is there until she catches a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye.  
When they reach her street, Flora removes her high-heels. Her mother has taken to listening out for the clack of high-heels coming down the street at night. If she hears them, she is liable to throw the window open and wake up her father to help her search the street.

They suspect something is wrong. They know she goes out at night, but they have not been able to catch her coming or going yet.  
Flora has begun to consider wearing sneakers to her appointments from now on.

She waves goodbye to Rosalie and Samson and sneaks into her house by the backdoor, careful not to make excessive amounts of noise, and to leave shallow footprints so her track will be covered quickly by the continuing snow-fall.  
Flora has had a good night. Ok, so her client was a piece of shit, but she enjoyed the ending of her night. Even Samson had his good points.

Flora tries calling Roman before she goes to sleep, but he will not answer his phone. She tries five more times, gives up, and falls into a deep sleep.

 

About half a block away, Roman is just turning his phone off after watching the sixth call go to voicemail.

If he can think of a way to discourage Flora from pursuing him without having to stop sleeping with her he’d do it in a heartbeat. Her attention makes him uncomfortable for some reason.

“Hey.” 

He looks up. Rosalie and Samson are coming down the street. One is dressed appropriately for the weather. The other wears torn-up tank-top and black jeans that stop at the knees, where her boots and fishnets start.

“Hey.” Roman gestures towards the graveyard “Uh, you guys…you know, ready?”

“Ready.” confirms Samson.

Rosalie’s face is dark “Let’s just get this over with.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will called Jack a 'turkey fucker'.


	25. A host of judges, jurors and executioners

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore warning, here. Like, major gore warning. You thought the gore was bad before? Nope, it's worse now. It's that subtle type of gore that makes you just want to scream EW and throw your compute in the trash. Well, that was my experience writing said gore, anyway.
> 
> Also, a small, just a one-sentence mention of child abuse. Not sexual, not physical beatings, but a certain terrible big brother poisoning one of his little sibs.
> 
> There are your warnings. You have been warned.  
> Enjoy, if you can.

(One day earlier)

Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte’s eyes are red when she opens the door.  
Then, wide with surprise, at seeing the two girls on her doorstep. Rosalie, freshly scrubbed of her usual black make-up and with the most offensive piercings removed to appear presentable to a conservative adult audience. Liberty, smiling sadly, with tears streaking her cheeks and a crumpled tissue sticking out of her pocket.

Both of them are dressed in sweaters- dug out of the back of Liberty’s closet for the occasion. Liberty wanted Rosalie to cry a little bit before going in, but she refused.

“Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte?” sniffs Liberty “Hi, you don’t know us, but we’re Louise’s friends.”

Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte raises an eyebrow. Even with the possible death of her daughter hanging over her head, scepticism is the first reaction she will jump to. Rosalie already guessed this from the description of her mother Louise would offer to anyone who appeared to be listening, and the white gold cross around her neck cements this idea.  
Nice Christian lady, home-schooling her daughter to keep her safe from the wiles and wickedness of the world. All of Louise’s friends are from church, so who, she thinks, are these two strangers crying on my doorstep?

This is where Rosalie steps in “We used to jog together, the three of us? Louise never mentioned us, did she?”

Liberty takes her cue and honks loudly into a tissue “She thought you wouldn’t like us, b-but when we heard- she didn’t come out last night to run with us- we like to run even w-when it gets snowy, we thought something w-was wrong. Then we h-heard, and it’s terrible!”

She hunches her shoulders and snorts dramatically into the tissue.

Whatever doubts Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte might have had about these strange girls and their strange relationship to her daughter has fallen away.

“Did she tell you where she was going?” she says hopefully.

Rosalie shakes her head and pretends to mop a tear from the corner of her eye “No, but we wondered if it was ok to look around her room? We’ve never seen it before.”

“And we wanted to leave a prayer in her room,” Liberty holds up a pristine sheet she has clutched at her side, with the Lord’s prayer written on it in neat script (they made Tyrone write it, because they both have chicken-scratch handwriting) “On her pillow, where she used to pray. So maybe, if God looks down at her room, he will see someone is thinking about her and He will send her back to us faster.”

If there was any way into Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte’s heart faster than these girls are worming in, it is Liberty’s prayer.  
She lets out a whimper and steps to the side, allowing them to enter.

Rosalie begins to play a drinking game inside her head- a shot of vodka for every piece of religious paraphernalia she sees. By the time they have gone upstairs and stopped in the doorway of Louise’s room, Rosalie would be drunk to the point of poisoning herself.

“What a lovely room,” she coos, taking in the grey walls and the pink cloud pattern painted on the ceiling by an unskilled hand.  
Four more shots’ worth of crucifixes and crosses.

Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte nods and sniffs, saying in a thick voice “I’ll leave you alone. Let me know if you want any help praying, and, oh, um…please don’t move anything. I want it to be just like it was when she left, so she can find everything when she gets back.”

Liberty gives her a watery smile “Us too. Thank you so much for letting us in. It feels like she’s here, you know?”

“I know,” says the mother “I sleep here now. It’s…it’s a way of keeping her close until she’s back at home. We’re hoping. We’re praying. Would you keep her in your prayers, until she’s found?”

“Of course.” says Rosalie.

Satisfied and doubly miserable now that she has been forced to look at her daughter’s room, Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte closes the door. They wait until the sound of sniffing and footsteps has retreated and a door has closed, then the girls bite their lower lips and turn to each other, each wearing a beaming expression.

“That was so easy,” whispers Rosalie “Holy shit, that was so easy. You’d think she’d be a little more suspicious.”

“I know, right? Like Louise has any friends!” scoffs Liberty, tossing the paper onto Louise’s heart-patterned pillow “Alrighty then, let’s get this over with.”

Louise has collected a little over forty teeth. She mentioned this in passing the other day, trusting, for some reason, that Malene would keep her secret. No sooner than Malene had managed to peel away from her did she run to tell Tyrone. Tyrone, Malene and Lakshmi all faked an illness the next day (loathe though they were to miss one of Professor Columbus’s classes), and LaToya faked a stomach ache. He then put the tiniest measure of bleach into his little sister’s food so she would be genuinely ill and occupy their father’s time with her wailing and crying.

They assembled in this very graveyard to discuss the problem, as it was far off any main roads and easy to hide behind some gravestones or duck into one of the open vaults on the off-chance someone happened along. Thanks to the three groundskeepers-cum-nightwatchmen (two trading shifts during the day, one doing a long stretch from 10p.m. to 6a.m., as LaToya discovered from listening to his mother’s idle chatter in line at the butcher’s shop), there were no security cameras either.

LaToya came to a conclusion quickly and easily.  
Tyrone invented an excuse and summoned Louise discreetly from her house, took her to the graveyard, down in the vault, gave her a drugged drink then stuffed her into one of the coffins there. The first one he could find a loose lid on, so they could retrieve her with ease.

Louise was kind of hard to fit inside, since she had a roommate, and the roommate was still relatively fresh and fleshy. 

Rosalie and Liberty were elected as the nicest-looking and least threatening (when Rosalie took out her snake-bites and covered up the tattoo reading ‘FUCK YOU’ on her upper-arm), and sent in to retrieve the evidence.

Once the drug had worn off and Louise had become conscious of her situation, she confessed. Lakshmi sat on top of the coffin and wrote down a list of the places within her room Louise had chosen to hide her trophies.  
She promised Louise they would let her out and let her go home.

She omitted the stage they planned in the middle of letting her out and letting her go home, as they decided Louise did not deserve to know if she could not fill in the blanks for herself.

 

Rosalie removes a piece of note-paper from her pocket and unfurls it on the floor. Positioning herself near the door to listen for Mrs Deauxma-Chiwelte, she pulls a pen from her bra and prepares to tick off the listed hiding spaces as Liberty collects from them.

Liberty rolls up on the tips of her toes and carefully removes an equine sport trophy from a shelf above a sparsely populated school-desk “Honestly, this girl was such a freak.”

“Try not to mess up the dust.”

“What?”

“Like, mess it up, so people can tell it’s been moved. LaToya said so in case they have to search Louise’s room. He says he overhead Jack Crawford telling the other agent with him they’re gonna re-interview the high-school demographic.”

Liberty frowns “Great. I have to remember what the hell I told them in the first place.”

She moves her hand a few centimetres over the surface of the shelf, so as not to disturb the dust as she searches. Her fingers graze the tip of a tooth. Liberty picks these up one at a time. She pulls a plastic bag, the size which would be used to hold a single stud or earring, and put the five teeth in here. She tosses these to Rosalie, who catches them smoothly and tucks the little bag into her sock, where it will be covered by the cuff of her jeans.

Liberty moves onto the bookshelf, which is stocked mostly with encyclopaedias and gothic teen romance novels. Shaking a few front-teeth out of the jacket of a vampire romance, she puts these into another bag and stores this bag in the waistband of her underwear, using a bobby pin stored on the elastic for the occasion to keep the bag from slipping down.   
She works in this way for ten minutes, causing as little disturbance as possible. Rosalie ticks off the hiding places as they go.

By the end of it, Rosalie has scratched fifteen separate hiding spaces off the list, and the girls have had to get very creative with where they hide the bags. Every time Liberty fixes her bra, she hears the tiniest clink of calcium issuing from the cups. Rosalie cannot sneeze for fear of dislodging one of the bags, precariously secured with bobby pins clipped to elastics and bands and cuffs.

“Well, fuck me, that was disgusting.” Liberty looks down at her hands, searching them for traces of dried blood “At least she cleaned them off after she took them. How did we not notice?”

Rosalie shrugs “She was a freak, but she was a smart freak. She was always bending over the faces, remember? She said it was because she wanted to cut the faces up- she was always taking off the lips, right? But she must have been really taking teeth out at the same time.”

They each pinch their noses to make themselves sniff, then press their thumbs gently into their own eyes to get a redness going, and a few tears flowing.  
Then, smiling one more time at each other, compose themselves to face Mrs DC, and thank her for her hospitality. 

 

 

“That’s real cute, by the way.” says Rosalie “You and Flora. You know she’s probably got every STD known to man by now.”

The cemetery is in sight. Its lights are muted and seem distant in the flurries of light snow, but neither of them are in any hurry. They know it will be at least another fifteen minutes before they are joined by the others.

Samson has walked on in silence so far, either uninterested or unsure of what to say to Rosalie. At school, they never speak. If not to keep suspicion down, then also because they have no similarities. None in terms of personality, preferences, likes or dislikes. The Hand is literally the only thing which unites them in any way. So, for Samson, coming up with something to say to Rosalie is a real task.

“What?”

“What?” she repeats, snorting “What do you mean, what? You’re gonna try to fuck her, right?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

Rosalie blinks “Well, blow me down. I misjudged you, Samson. Here I thought you were just gonna stalk her until she did you for free. Or for a discount.”

He glowers, but not at her “What’s the point of all this if we just go off and do it ourselves?”

Rosalie pushes the cemetery gate open slowly, cautious of the hinges squealing. There may yet be others in there who have no business with the Hand. Since they have arrived first, at least a half hour before the time decided, it is up to them to search for any vagrants braving the winter, or a few others, possibly age contemporaries, looking for ghosts or something.

“I guess you’re right,” she muses “But we’re different, aren’t we?”

“We’re bored.”

She lets out a short, harsh laugh “Shit, man, you sure don’t romanticise this stuff, do you? Yeah, we’re bored. We’re bored for a good reason, though. When you’re bored, it’s from a lack of stimulation. My old man always says the smart are the ones who make their own stimulation.”

Samson closes the door carefully behind them “You think your old man wants you killing off your high-school buddies?”

“You think I’m fucking stupid?” she proposes it like a genuine question, and smiles a smile that sets her teeth gleaming in the weak lamp-light “I know for a fact he’d have me committed if he didn’t shoot me himself. I think he’d be horrified if I he knew what his little girl was doing, ‘cos he’s nothing like me at all.”

They walk on in silence for a few moments. After judging at least the immediate area to be free of vagrants, Rosalie puts her back to the cold wall of a stone vault. The family inside are all long-dead, and the only ones who seem to have attended to the grave recently would be the elements. Bringing offerings of dead leaves, blown up at the bottom of the vault, and cracking the stone slowly with icy winds. The same wind whistles, howls, and makes all sorts of other disconcerting noises inside the vault.

Perhaps it is the rueful mood that compels Rosalie to open up the fraction that she does. Something about the reminder of mortality- of her own lack of invincibility, which she strives to prove each time she murders- when one puts one’s back to a stone vault in a lonely cemetery has sobered her mood.  
Either that, or these thoughts have stewed and steeped for a long time. What Samson gets is only the shriek of the kettle letting its surroundings know it is boiling, at any rate, as opposed to a splash of hot water or a burn from the steam.

Later, he may look back on this moment and regret that he did not tell LaToya.

“You ever think about why we’re doing what we’re doing?”

He shrugs “Every time.”

Her eyes are aimed on the frozen ground. The grass that is visible could be made of plaster or marble, and simply painted to look organic.  
Much like the two teenagers standing on top of it, or on top of the snow-blanket the grass is underneath.

“What do you think?”

“I think we’re doing an important job. Showing this town a side of itself it didn’t know it had. People, too. People didn’t know that other people could haul off and do this. Not outside of all of those far-away warzones in the Middle East and Africa. Not off the front page of a newspaper. Not to their own children and their children’s friends and their friends’ children.”

Rosalie’s mouth curves in a bitter, reluctant smile “That’s the most I’ve heard you say in one go. Say, Samson, what is it that fucked you up so bad? I mean, I was just born fucked in the head, and Liberty figures she’s fucked up because her parents never give her enough attention. But your dad is nice. What is he doing, touching you or something?”

A shadow flickers across his face “Not him.”

“Oh. Oh yeah? An uncle?”

“That’s not what fucked me up. Getting touched up doesn’t make you want to murder people.”

She cocks a slim eyebrow “You sure about that, buddy? And I am sorry, by the way, I am truly sorry some sick bastard got his rocks off to you, but, like, you kinda gotta accept that must have something to do with how…” she twirls a forefinger around her ear “…you are.”

“You ever get sick of talking shit? It’s all that ever comes out of you. Your mouth must taste pretty foul at the end of the day.”

Rosalie considers her options, and, because she doesn’t feel like taking on a six-foot guy at this time of night, she lets out a strained, derisive laugh “I’d say the same about you, Sammy, but you never use that. Your mouth has gotta be the least used mouth in town.”

“Put that on the list of things we’d never say to Roman.”

This is so unexpected Rosalie has to laugh again. She means it, this time, and eventually has to double over.   
She wipes at the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes with a knuckle “Where did that come from?”

Samson gestures past the vault.  
Peering around the vault, Rosalie sees a pair of head-lights just before they blink off in the distance. She glowers, unable to believe how stupid he is being.

Even if he doesn’t park in front of the gates, people may see his car. And those people may wonder why Roman Wallender’s car is so far from its shared garage at this time of the night, and with this kind of snow piling up. Any number of people could have seen him driving around, empty as the streets are.  
The younger among them would know to write it off as Roman conducting some pimp-related business. The older part of the town would have no idea and may begin to suspect.

One of them under suspicion is all it would take. Especially if that person were Roman. Considering his spectacular fuck-up with the married couple that live out on the edge of town, Roman is already on thin ice.  
Rosalie thinks of him privately, and to Liberty (which is practically the same as thinking it privately), as expendable and she is pretty sure most of the others think of him like this as well.

“That kid is gonna get us all killed.” she remarks, forgetting Samson is there.

“Yep.” he says stoically “He is.”

From the inside of the vault, a thin, hoarse moan echoes.

 

“Honestly, I was surprised to get your call. You know what this case looks like from the outside? Well the media has a total black-out, and so do we. No one has any idea what is happening down here.” Price interrupts himself to give Jack an awkward, earnest hug with one arm, and then drops his snow-dusted coat over the back of the chair. He continues, nervous and unsure of himself “Rumour was you’d closed in on Bedelia du Maurier.”

Jack blinks. He has not spared her a thought in a long time “An entire town doesn’t get shut down from the media and the FBI itself for a suspect wanted for questioning, Price.”

“Well that’s the thing- you’re not really shut down, you’re just getting blocked all over the place. It’s like this town is on an island and none of the news ever leaves the island.” 

To prove his point, he gestures around the morgue. 

“I mean, what a body count.”

Though it may be slightly illegal and has certainly been landing the police department in a lot of hot water, every single body the case has created so far has been kept out of the earth.   
Thanks to a competent couple of morticians and a hard-working refrigerating unit, there have been no complaints about the smell so far. Only a few off-handed comments, tossed around the police headquarters, that so-and-so thinks she saw one of the bodies move and somebody else said they felt a tap on their shoulder in the morgue when there was no one else in the room.

Standard fare. Price and Zeller used to tell stories about bodies going missing late at night, then turning up again in the morning with a trail of dirty footprints leading from the room and down the hall, right back to their slab.   
Anything to freak Will out that they could think of, because they were both impressed and annoyed by his lack of squeamishness in a morgue. Those two preferred it when their colleagues could also be made into victims, to have a sly shot of bile squirted at them for giggles, or to turn green with hair-raising stories of autopsies gone wrong and necrophyte morticians’ apprentices. 

“How many are we looking at?”

“I’ve lost count.”

Price pulls on a plastic glove and snaps it a few times, the way Jack remembers him doing. He picks up the corner of a sheet very delicately and lifts it, inspecting the dead face beneath.

“Good Lord. She’s young.”

“They all are.”

Tahcawin has been standing with her back to the wall and her eyes averted since Price came in, but now she straightens up and walks over to the refrigerated drawers. Each of the bodies are stored away, save this girl, who is the first of the number of victims which will be dragged out in turn to be subjected to Price’s scrutiny. Pulling open one of the drawers, Tahcawin gestures for him to come over.

Price does so, hesitantly and nervously, and almost flinches back when he sees what Tahcawin has shown him. A professional coroner turning a delicate shade of green, cupping a hand over his mouth and averting his eyes. Jack guesses he must be looking at Cassiopeia Klein.

“This is the kind of stuff we’re seeing. It varies, each time we find another body. Most of the time, they like to have couples torture each other. Or themselves to save their partner.”

She points to a drawer labelled with only a legible ‘D’, but the rest of the name has been lost in the indecipherable scrawl of some terrible hand-writing “That one castrated himself for his boyfriend.”

“Well.” says Price, giving himself a little shake “That’s creative.”

“Creative is all these murders are,” Jack’s eyes wander over to the corpse on the slab. He has forgotten her name, and cannot match her face to one of the victims thanks to damage; someone spent her last minutes smashing her face repeatedly into a hard surface “Beyond that, there is no art to these murders.”

Price nods and snaps his glove again “I noticed that, looking at her. See, I thought I was gonna get some bodies with glass in the eyes and the labia, or posed to look like the Mona Lisa or the Wedding and Kanaan- that would take a lot of bodies. Instead, I get what appears to be a bunch of victims of a gang-mauling by wolves. This is seriously disturbing, Jack. I don’t say that a lot. I didn’t think that about those lobotomised men with the beehives in their skulls. I didn’t think that about those couples flayed and posed to look like angels. I didn’t even think that about those people killed and arranged in a colour gradient to look like an eye staring at God out of that grain silo. But this? This is just wrong.”

Over the course of Price’s graphic descriptions, Tahcawin’s mouth has fallen open “Eye?” she repeats.

“Eye,” confirms Price “There was an eye. I would have thought you woulda read about that case when you heard you were getting assigned to this old fart,” he jabs his thumb at Jack “Anyway, I better get started on the Little Miss without the face, over there.”

Jack senses Tahcawin is in need of some explanation “Price is an old colleague of mine. He and another coroner were responsible for the forensics of most of the cases we were put on, including all of Hannibal’s murders as the Shrike.”

“And that weird one with the bear skeleton.” adds Price “I used to have a beautiful assistant, but he had to leave the profession. Got in a family way, you know? He’s on paternity leave right now, otherwise I might have brought him with me.”

“Paternity leave?”

Price folds the sheet down to the girl’s destroyed breast to inspect her face “No one told you? Zeller has a kid. Two kids, in fact.”

“Adopted?”

“No, with his girlfriend. You thought he was gay, right?”

“Along with the rest of the Homicide unit, yes, I did.”

Price laughs “According to him, he was gay right up until he met his girlfriend. Love works in mysterious ways. Just like murder. Damn, this girl went through the grinder, didn’t she? I assume you found fragments of her face and bones everywhere?”

Jack shrugs “Not everywhere.”

“No trophies?”

“Not as far as we can see.”

“Has anyone checked for missing organs?”

“The initial autopsies were sloppy. The morgue wasn’t prepared for the volume of bodies flooding in, and besides, there are still a few townspeople dying of natural causes.”

Price peels what is left of the lips back with a finger and counts the teeth. He pauses. His face grows troubled.

“Post-mortem photos. The head-shots. Can I see them?”

Tahcawin goes over to a desk at the far side of the room and digs through the files, producing what he has asked for. Peeling off his gloves, Price takes the photos from her and looks through them. With each photo he sees, his face grows darker and darker.

“You searched the surrounding areas after each murder?”

“Yes.” confirms Jack “There were never any missing pieces. No trophies are being taken, as far as we can tell.”

“Well, look, Jack,” he summons him over “Look at this.”

Jack looks.  
It only takes him a few seconds to notice what Price has noticed. When he does, he cannot believe he missed it.

Many of the faces of the victims no longer have lips. These were cut away and flung into the snow beside them, or else, packed into the pockets of their partners. Jack suspects this was a kind of foreplay to the actual murder- forcing the boyfriend or girlfriend to hold their significant other’s pieces as they came off. What he, Tahcawin and the rest of the police force have failed to realise is that there is a certain part of the victim’s bodies that cannot be accounted for.

Teeth. A few teeth, missing from every photo without lips Jack sees. Quickly, Price matches faces to names, those with lips against those without, and hustles over to the drawers. He pulls out a body and peels back the lips.

“Missing two over here. Molars, on Mahiru Takeshi. Write that down for me, Agent Walker?”

Tahcawin pulls a receipt out of her pocket and jots it down.

“And we’re sure these teeth cannot be accounted for?” asks Price from the next corpse.

“Yes.”

“Trophies. Trophies are being taken. Little ones the murderer can hide. From the number going missing- two, three or just one at a time, I would guess either one of the cult members is taking the teeth secretly, or they are taking turns on who gets to take the teeth.”

Tahcawin looks encouraged “Now we have something to search for.”

Price frowns over the beaten face of a child “Jack, come here. This child isn’t missing a single tooth.”

“We don’t think that murder is related to the cult murders.”

“Well, no. Not unless this little guy has a secret special friend. It’s possible. Last girlfriend I had was in third grade, you know. Forensics is a lonely profession.”

“Why the hell would they be taking the teeth?” asks Tahcawin sceptically- sceptic of the motives, rather than Price’s reasoning “Why would anyone take evidence to link them to these murders? Anyone participating in this will be lucky if they don’t bring back the death penalty especially for this.”

“Some people just can’t resist. Teeth are small and easy to hide. Think about the average three-bedroom house in this town, then tell me how many places there would be to hide those teeth.” says Jack.

It is troubling to think about.  
Someone is taking the teeth. Even with a large house, they must be living alone, or confident that wherever they hide the teeth will not be discovered by whoever it is they live with.

Jack remembers being a teenager. He had at least a half dozen places to hide his contraband cigarettes, dirty magazines and liquor from his parents.  
Spaces he was confident would never be found.

“I didn’t see a thing of the town when I came in. It was snowing and dark, except…I think I may have hit a chicken on the way in? Agent Walker, missing the two front teeth on this one.”

 

When LaToya arrives, Samson’s lips have turned blue. Rosalie still shows no outwards effects of being in the cold for upwards of forty-five minutes now, and Roman has shrunk so deeply into the folds of his thick coat, it is hard to pick his shape out in there at all. Looks more like his trench-coat stands on its own.

LaToya melts out of the dark, wearing a thick, child’s jacket with rings of stuffing that seem to emulate a walrus’s blubber, and a woolly hat with tassels dangling on either side. His boots crunch on the snow.   
To avoid leaving any traces that might be tracked back to them, LaToya has had everyone purchase and wear a set of boots identical to the pair the groundskeeper of the cemetery wears. If anyone should find a single footprint before the snow has time to bury them, they will think the groundskeeper has been about.

He dozes nearby, in a shed glowing from the dying fire lit inside. LaToya has placed a microphone inside the shed, underneath the lone wooden chair which furnishes the shed. This way, any movement from the inside will broadcast loud and clear to him.

LaToya has even gone to the effort of filling up the ample empty space inside his shoes with rocks, so his weight will appear to be that of a man of the groundskeeper’s hulking size. If it makes it more difficult to walk, LaToya gives no sign of it.

He approaches silently and settles leaning against a headstone in front of the vault. With the thick toe of his boot, he grinds at the little shell of ice under his feet, to give him better footing.

Inside the vault, the first thin wail has been followed by muffled screams. So muffled, in fact, one could not hear them unless one was expressly listening for them.   
“How long has she been doing that?” he asks.

Rosalie checks her pocket-watch “About forty minutes.”

He nods.

Samson and Liberty, who showed up only moments before and holds Rosalie’s other hand, remain silent. 

But Roman cannot help but try to fill the silence “I went down there to check on her, before you got here. The coffin lid hasn’t moved. She’s still in there pretty securely.”

“I know.” says LaToya “You didn’t need to check.”

“How did you know?” he presses, before he can catch himself. Now, knowing that he has gone far enough, Roman decides he might just as well go ahead and press a little further “I mean, did you check or anything?”

“I did. Earlier.”

A silence falls. A silence like the snow, kind of; downy and light, but creeping into the bones with a breath-taking cold.

Roman cringes a little further inside his jacket “Um, I told you guys the thing with Calliope Jones worked out ok?”

“You did.”

“I was there,” says Samson shortly “I saw it happen.”

“And I know who the other woman living with them is. The Asian one. I got my cousin drunk and looked through her stuff- she’s a specialist, you know, with all these wanted posters. It’s her job to look out for suspicious people in town. Anyway, there was a wanted poster out for this woman a while ago.”

Roman digs around in a deep pocket and produces a crumpled, folded piece of paper. He opens up the paper as the other three gather around- LaToya shows no interest whatsoever.   
In the centre of the photo is a woman, Japanese by descent. Her face is cold. Stiff. Unwilling to ply itself to the emotions of happiness or surprise that one might wear when being caught candid at a party, as she is, going by the fantastic dress and the drink in her hand.

The picture is dated as being taken four years ago in Western Europe- they aren’t sure where, according to the poster. The poster is not sure of anything but of the pseudonym she goes by.

“The Shrike,” repeats Rosalie “No wonder she’s on Lecter’s grounds.”

“Lecter’s and Graham’s.” corrects LaToya.

She repeats this obediently “Is she a mercenary?”

Roman nods “She’s responsible, partially, at least, for that big fucking bloodbath they had out at Muskrat farm. Just before that happened, Mason Verger, the guy who got drowned by Lecter in his own eel pond? Yeah, he figured out she was working with or for Lecter and had a bunch of these posters printed up and distributed across America. The search isn’t active. This poster is way old- five years or six years or something, so if we kill her and hide the body well, no one will be looking anyway.”

Liberty eyes the obscene reward sum, bold at the bottom of the page “Why didn’t he do this with Lecter? And Graham? He would have gotten them in a lot faster.”

“It’d be too fiddly. You know, like, you get Interpol involved and shit gets messy. He wouldn’t’a been able to drag them off to his farm and murder them the way he wanted to.”

“He wanted to wear Will Graham’s face, you know that?” asks Roman.

“Yeah, Roman, we know,” says a voice from a few headstones over- it’s Tyrone, closely followed by Malene and Lakshmi, and all of them are kitted out in heavy coats, scarves, and identical boots “We all read the same book. Sorry we’re so late. Took ages to walk here.”

“Oh, speaking of Freddie Lounds, I saw her in Noor’s store today. With Mercy Waters. She was wearing a big sunhat and a pair of coloured glasses, but it was super obvious. A, who wears a sunhat in winter? B, I could see her prosthetic arm. It looked like the one you always see her wear in the news.”

“She doesn’t know they’re in town, does she?” asks Liberty nervously.

Lakshmi scoffs “Yeah, really? No, no way! If she did, she would have run screaming to the press the moment she saw them. I don’t know how those two think they’re gonna stay hidden from her-”

“It won’t be a challenge,” interrupts LaToya “All they have to do is avoid the crime-scenes during the daytime, and avoid Mercy Waters.”

“We should kill Mercy Waters, right?” asks Malene.

LaToya nods “Tyrone, you and I will do that in a few days.”

Tyrone seems pleased to be included. Pleased to the extent that he does what Roman just did, and Roman can’t help but notice his question isn’t followed by a deathly, hostile silence “Why not now?”

LaToya shrugs “What are we going to do with Lounds if we kill her host so soon?”

“You want us to kill Freddie Lounds too?” asks Lakshmi.

“Firstly, I want us to get her and Jack Crawford together. If she gets near him, she’s going to guess who is here. Correctly.”  
His eyes darken, suddenly.

It is frightening. Liberty cannot help but shrink into Rosalie’s frozen shoulder. Normally, LaToya’s eyes sit inside his head, as unresponsive as a pair of river-washed stones. Even when he has taken the knife or the pipe from another to finish a kill himself, it is easy to tell from his eyes he takes no pleasure in the task.  
LaToya kills for the same reason a shark bites- to test the durability of his intended prey. If the taste displeases him, he leaves the victim to bleed out at the surface, in full view of a hundred other hungry things. If he likes what he gets, he bites again, and does not stop until he has eaten his fill.

LaToya can no more help killing than a shark can help biting.  
It is just the way he has been designed. Not with crushing jaws and a mouth which can replace any one of dozens of teeth in an instant, but with a mind that is completely closed to joy, to empathy, and to love. Romantic or otherwise.

So, of course, it is an occasion to be alarmed when his eyes light up with an emotion.  
Something that might be admiration, but with the difficult, weak lighting and his face’s habit of sucking light into it as opposed to reflecting it out like everyone else’s, it is really impossible to tell.

All they know is that they have seen something which makes them profoundly uncomfortable.

“She’s not our kill. We’re not killing for protection unless we have to. I don’t want Freddie Lounds’ dirt blood on me.”  
His words are punctuated by an especially violent cry from down in the vault. 

As usual, Lakshmi catches on quickly “You want us to lead her to them?”

Malene joins in “You’re right! She is their kill to make, isn’t she? Last time they only took a piece, but if we help them corner her, they could get the rest of her too.”

“They saw her at the gallery.”

All eyes on Samson. It is strange to hear him joining in a group discussion. 

He continues, nonplussed by the sudden volume of attention on him “I know they saw her at the gallery. I was watching Dr Lecter and his husband. I saw them leave the room. I wouldn’t’a seen them go if I weren’t waiting for it.”

“That was when they contacted Jack Crawford, yes?” asks Roman, rather redundantly.

“No, before that. I wasn’t there when they went to see Crawford. But I saw them leave and the last thing Dr Lecter looked at was Lounds, so it’s easy to guess what they were looking at.”

“Oh.” Roman is crestfallen, and wishing he had taken up the invitation Flora extended earlier that evening to spend the night.  
It would have been nice to have someone to talk to who listens, even if she would have insisted on sex.

Tyrone slaps his hands together and sends up a little poof of fluff and frost from his gloves, into the frigid air “Alright, sounds good. You need any help on surveillance?”

LaToya shakes his head “Rosalie has it covered.”

“That I do.”

“Rosalie, you’re fucking freezing, aren’t you?”

Rosalie grins at Lakshmi “Hell no! I hate the heat. This weather is brilliant.”

The other woman rolls her eyes in a combination of wonder and disgust “You are so weird.”

Another thin, agonised wail from the depths of the vault.

“We better attend to that.” says Lakshmi, pulling a knife from her pocket.

LaToya nods, and they file down the dark, narrow stairs, into the darkness of the vault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ignore Liberty and Rosalie's attitudes. Nothing wrong with being Christian, homeschooled, or both. They're just ignorant jerks who murder people to feel better about themselves.


	26. The same boots

Jack is awoken in the middle of the night by a call.

Not even his phone- Tahcawin’s lights up and vibrates its way across her nightstand. Jack is awake on the second buzz and watches Tahcawin sleep through two more before he decides to intervene. Picking up the phone, he clears his throat in an attempt not to sound half-asleep, and says “Agent Crawford here. What is it?”

He does not recognise the number. Neither he nor Tahcawin have made the effort of saving the numbers of any of the police force into their phones, but Sharon’s. And that is only because she will occasionally ask them to pick up milk on the way back from whatever crime scene they have just gone over- sometimes Jack needs to text her to ask if she wants skim, full-fat or one of those weird, fake milks like that one made from almonds Bella used to put in her coffee. 

The Sheriff is on the other end “We need you down here right now. Both of you.”

Jack yawns and throws a pillow at Tahcawin. It thumps onto her head, but has no visible effect. Attracted by the noise, Winston scoots out from under Jack’s bed and licks Tahcawin’s dangling hand.

Jack throws the covers off “Where?”  
He then pulls the covers back on. One of them forgot to close the window completely, and the room is frigid. A light dusting of snow has blown in through the cracked window and covered the floor. Even some of Jack’s bedsheets.

“The graveyard.”

Excellent, he thinks.

Graveyards are not fun places for Jack.  
Ever since his grandfather let him watch ‘Night of the Living Dead’ during one of the many summers he spent in their house in the suburbs of Bumfuck, South Carolina (or ‘Charleston’, as it is known in polite company), Jack has hated graveyards with a furious passion. His grandfather wanted him to watch the movie because there was a black man running the show; calling the shots and saving the obligatory hysterical damsel. He wanted to show his grandson a black man being empowered, for once, but Jack was distracted from the social commentary by the zombies.

The moment that well-dressed man with the crazy look in his eyes stumbled up to Barbara, Jack was hiding underneath a blanket. He saw the entire movie through the lacy trim of one of his grandmother’s throw-pillow. Although only the opening occurred in a graveyard, the scene made such an impression on him that a hate for graveyards has persisted into his late adulthood.  
Bella would have been buried on a family plot on her cousins’ ranch in Texas, but she decided she would have half her ashes interred there and the rest given to Jack, knowing her husband would be reluctant to go near the graveyard.

Now, the thought of venturing out into a snowy night- the dead of a snowy night, at that- into a graveyard where a cult has apparently just been active makes Jack’s stomach turn.

He hates his job.

“How many?”

“This one is…this one is different. We got one dead of natural causes and the other dead all alone.”

Jack blinks, and shoots Winston a confused side-long look “Natural causes? Did someone freeze in this weather?”  
A drunk could have passed out in the cold. Somebody slipped, knocked themselves out and lay in a snow drift until the snow buried them and suffocated them. Even a snow-well. Do those exist in cities, he wonders? The only person he knows who fell into a snow-well did so in a national park, full of ancient, enormous pines. Those scraggly asphodels they have growing in the local graveyards aren’t big enough to get the job done.

And on top of that, a lone corpse?

This is getting stranger. As he knew it would, the moment Murder Husbands stuck their noses in.

“We’re on our way,” Jack flings off the blankets and forces himself to shiver his way over to the window, pushing it shut “Give us twenty minutes.”

He hangs up his phone and begins to look through his suitcase.

“Where the hell did I put Winston’s sweater?”

 

Thirty one minutes later, a bedraggled couple of detectives and an excited dog have made it to the graveyard. Only one portion of it can really be called a crime-scene, actually, and it is extraordinarily easy to tell which one.

Electric light spills out of a dilapidated shed that looks like somewhere broken garden equipment might be stored. On the other side of the cemetery, the other scene is lit by a few hastily placed flood-lights. A vault door hangs open. The remains of a girl lies at an awkward angle. Her body bends with the steps. Her fingers are ragged. Her clothes are ripped. Her hair has been pulled- even from this distance, Jack can clearly see a piece of her scalp was ripped out, presumable in the process of ripping off a good hank of hair.

 

The nasty looking shed turns out to be the guard’s shack. That is exactly how Sheriff Dunn describes it. Jack’s immediate instinct is to ask why their corpses are worth guarding in this town, thinks of zombies, brushes away all thoughts of zombies, and swallows his question. He is here to be professional.

Price, on the other hand, is acting like a tourist.  
He has walked straight up to the dead body and is having a good, hard look at it. Peeling the lips open to look for missing teeth, peering down the top of the shirt for missing chunks of skin, letting loose an inappropriately amused exclamation every now and then that is attracting him some weird looks from the officers. He also appears to be searching for something in the snow. A few officers around him are bent double and pawing through the snow with plastic gloves, but Jack cannot think what they might be looking for.

“This one,” the Sheriff points to the body, sprawled in a red puddle in front of the vault “Got a real number done on her. It’s one of the missing girls.”

Tahcawin sighs through her nose “Alone. Sexual assault, then?”

“None whatsoever!” calls out Price “She was just beaten and mauled!”

This throws her “What, then? Why would the Hand take a girl without a partner?”

The Sherriff fishes in his pocket and retrieves a plastic evidence bag. He holds it up in the harsh light “We think this might have been an inside job.”

Jack pauses “Price told you about the teeth, then?”

Sherriff Dun nods.

“How did he do that? We closed up the morgue,” she checks her watch, her eyes bleary “Only three hours ago. How did he explain it so quickly?”

Price answers in a raised voice “I never left!”

She shoots a strange look his way. As she does, one of the officers calls for an evidence bag. Their hands are cupped together.

The Sherriff doesn’t feel the need to defend himself for being in at the office late, and ploughs right on with his explanation “These are teeth.”

Jack resists the urge to gasp and express his profound shock.  
Teeth? He never would have recognised them!”

“From each victim, you think, but you haven’t had time to test them yet.” finishes Jack.

Nodding, the Sherriff passes the bag onto another officer, and takes a cup of coffee from her hands. He knocks the whole thing back in one steaming gulp, crushes the cup against the side of his knitted hat, and throws the trash to another officer.

“Should I bag this?” they ask.

The Sherriff stifles a burp “No, just throw it in the trash. Damned good coffee. Whose was it?”

The officer bagging the teeth puts her hand up, her expression sour “Mine, sir. Instant stuff, my boyfriend uses it to help him mark papers.”

“We need some of that in the break room. That’s some amazing stuff,” he turns back to the agents “This little miss here has all her teeth. The collected teeth were thrown on her. So, we suspect this is some kind of punishment.”

At this late hour of the night, Tahcawin takes her time putting the pieces together “You think they were punishing one of their own for taking trophies?”

He shrugs “I can’t think of a single other way of how all them- ‘scuse me, those, all those teeth could have gotten here. Or why they’d kill a girl on her own.”

“Sir! Can we put the dog in one of the cars?” calls an officer from the shack. He has a hand on Winston’s collar and is straining to keep Winston from bustling inside “He wants to go inside and sit by the fire! He’ll disturb the crime-scene!”

Rolling his eyes, the Sherriff responds without turning around “We got pictures of the shack and the body! We know the guard died of natural causes! Now, it’s a damned cold night and all that dog has is a sweater- a charming sweater, did you knit it?” he adds to Jack, who shakes his head “So let the poor bastard inside and warm his paws up! Gawd.”

The officer lets go. Winston shoots inside. Jack can imagine him turning around three times in front of the dead man’s fire and settling with his rump to the open flames, while his snout is tucked in between the feet of the dead man.  
That is how Winston sits with Jack in front of their fires.

“Explain this to me, Sherriff,” Jack gestures towards the shack “How did this all happen? What exactly is the nature of the natural death?”

“Well, Mr Gosling, the butcher’s husband, he works this job. He has a bum ticker- had, excuse me, which he has to take all kinds of medication for. It seems like Mr Gosling just up and died before he could get to his medicine. Folks with heart conditions die unexpectedly all the time. My old man had himself a bad heart too, and he just keeled over right in the middle of my sister’s son’s bar mitzvah. That was one helluva day, let me tell you.” he clears his throat, and beckons them towards the shack.

Jack does not like that they are leaving the light to do this. The floodlights cast a weak, filmy glow all around the area. However, this is not nearly deep enough to penetrate the shadows of the headstones and the deep, dark stuff between the looming vaults. 

Tahcawin stumbles over his foot; he has unconsciously drifted so close to her as to be underfoot. She cusses. Not at him, but the ice on the ground, which she apparently blames for her loss of balance.

Jack tries his hardest not to think about zombies. So, of course, zombies are the only thing he can think of.  
Zombies clawing their way through the frozen ground to snap his ankles in half- which would be very impressive, considering that all of the weight he has gained since retiring seems to be collecting there. Zombies scratching on the door of the vaults. Zombies staggering out from between headstones in dinner jackets, with their arms outstretched for an embrace and their eyes wide, dead, staring.

“Sir, you’re stepping on my feet.” says Tahcawin.

They are also shoulder-to-shoulder at this point, and walking in perfect synchronisation. Like a pair of Marines stuck together by a strip of Velcro running down their forearms.

Jack draws back, but not very far “Excuse me, Agent Walker, that was poor of me.”

She shakes her head and says in an undertone “If I’m honest sir, I don’t mind the crowding. I always get a little uneasy around graveyards. My father showed me ‘Night of the Living Dead’ when I was a little too young for it.”

If Jack still had a wife in Baltimore to write back to, he would have described this moment in an email the moment he got back to their lodgings.

The man in the shack is unfortunately young for someone dying of natural causes. He cannot be that far into his thirties. He is arranged in an old rocking chair, his hands hanging limp, his mouth open and slack with a frosting of foam in the corners of his mouth. The wedding band on his finger gleams wistfully in the dying fire-light.  
To his relief, Winston has not stuck his snout between the man’s feet. He sits quite close to the fireplace to catch the last of the dying embers. If the pervasive smell of sewage from the man’s slackened bowels bothers him, Winston gives no indication.

The smell has kept everyone else out of the shack, however. The officers are all hovering around the door, rather than venturing into the evil smell. The pictures have been taken. What little evidence there is, catalogued. Now all there is to do is comfort the freshly-made widow.

The woman Jack recognises as the butcher sits a fair distance from the shack. Her husband’s body is in full-view from this angle, but the smell is not so bad here. She has been thoughtfully given a foil blanket for shock, and apart from that, is dressed in heavy layers for the cold.

The Sherriff makes a bee-line for her. At their approach, she looks up. Her face is red and chapped from crying.

She does not wait to be asked “He had a heart attack. I always told him this stupid job was gonna kill him. Alone all night. Cold as anything, these past few nights. But he didn’t listen to me. He always told me I was being too cautious. Now he’s had a big fucking heart attack and I was right all along.” she gives them a wry smile that causes her lip to split. A bead of blood slithers out and drips from her chin.

The Sherriff steps in “She didn’t see a thing. Didn’t hear a thing from the Hand. She was on her way out-”

“To take him home,” she says “He needed to come home. The guy who picks up his shift called me. He told me they were closing the guard shack because it was getting so cold and I needed to go get my husband because he wasn’t answering his phone. So I did. I haul my ass out into this weather at this time of the night- the morning, and I find him dead. The other girl too.”

She lowers her head. Her shoulders heave with a silent sob. The Sherriff pats her stiffly on the shoulder and mutters something about doing all she could have done.

“What really bothers me is the footprints. When we got here, there were footprints all around the little miss. All around Ms Deauxma-Chiwelte. All the same make. All the same size. You know what the size and the make was? The same as the guard’s. These people all bought the same pair of boots to make it look like any footprints the snow didn’t take care of for them would belong to the guard.”

 

Tahcawin lets out a low whistle “Jesus. That’s thorough.”

He nods and leads them a little ways away from the butcher, so they can discuss the murderers in peace “Very. Very clever too. The problem is, the guard was dead for about an hour by the time he was supposedly walking around the murder scene. Mr Gosling is famous for sleeping through most of his shifts. They knew that. They counted on that.”

“And if that girl back there is a member of the Hand of Jophiel, then Price was right.” finishes Jack “He explained that to you as well?”

“What, that he thinks our children are murdering our children? Yes, he did.”

The Sherriff’s face is grim. He summons an officer with a shrill whistle.

“Somebody’s gotta tell this girl’s mama she’s been found.”

The officer’s face crumples. Clearly, he is expected to do this “Sir, maybe you should send over a Christian officer? She’ll want to pray with me, and I’m not comfortable with that-”

The Sherriff waves a hand dismissively “She starts praying to Jesus, then you just start praying to your guru. Go on, Singh, get busy. And use some bed-side manner this time.”

Singh trudges off and hops into one of the cars outside the gate. He pulls out, stops suddenly, slamming on his brakes and skidding a few feet on the ice. The woman he nearly hit throws herself the rest of the way across the street and catches herself on the bars of the cemetery. Singh rolls down the window and shouts something nervous and indistinct. The moment the woman opens her mouth, Jack has a shiver of dread.

It is not that he recognises the voice.  
He recognises the tone of it. He recognises that familiar, sinking sensation that made his gut heavy and his head ache prematurely every time he laid eyes on that frizzed red hair, and that smug look. That ‘I don’t know everything you do but I will soon’ look which made it such a challenge to his willpower not to whop her in the face.

“Ma’am, you can’t be in here!” say about five separate officers at once.

She ignores them all and throws off one misguided attempt to hold her back. She makes a beeline for Jack.  
Winston lopes out of the shack and growls at her, his hackles raised.

“Good Lord, Agent Crawford, you kept his dog?” says Freddie Lounds.


	27. A severed finger of Jophiel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: non-graphic sex scene, not Hannigram, I'm afraid, but there is a good deal of Hannigram in the first bit. Second bit we get to see Jack and Freddie butting heads, and Price being sassy. Eeeeeeey.

(Several years earlier) 

There are things you only learn about your partner once you are in the relationship. Most of these things pertain to those tiny human imperfections. And most of those imperfections become the most obvious in the bedroom.

From the outside looking in, Hannibal would have had no way to guess that Will was such a relentless cuddle-monster, conscious and asleep, he has to be tickled on the sides to be persuaded to let go and let him out of bed. Will never would have guessed that Hannibal puts a pillow over his face to sleep and cannot sleep without at least a little bit of blanket on him at all time. Even in the height of summer, and even if it’s just a single foot underneath a single corner.

They never would have guessed they have a habit in common.  
At what point did one have the occasion to look on the other as a peer in the days before the Dragon’s intervention? They were more as rivals than as partners until Will decided they needed to take the figurative plunge by executing a literal one off an ocean cliff. When exchanging knives and wiping blood from each other’s eyes, it was easy to see why they were attracted to each other, and why they worked.

But Will has discovered more of these moments more and more, as their lives gradually unfurl from that of individuals and wind up together into a single, meshed life.

He was pleasantly surprised to discover that, when sleeping in a hotel room, and when being disturbed by the sounds of intimacy from one of the nearby rooms, Hannibal, too, will applaud at the end when the couple have finally reached their climax and given that deep, spent sigh of satisfaction.

Not loudly enough to be heard, however. That would be uncomfortable.

“Your feet are freezing.” says Will.

“And you haven’t clipped your toenails. You’re scratching me.”

“Move your feet and I’ll move mine.”

“I don’t want to move out of the warmth.”

“Make another warm spot.”

A loud gasp from the next room. A gasp of feminine pleasure, which Will has decided is masterfully faked.

Hannibal sighs in a combination of disgust and wonderment.

“There they go again,” remarks Will “She has to be tearing by now.”

“I find the was feminine organ remarkably elastic.”

Will thinks about all of the women his partner may have been with before, and, of course, inevitably, thinks of Alana Bloom. He moves his foot the length of Hannibal’s knee and takes care to scratch gently with his big toe all the way up. Hannibal shifts away from him until he is practically diagonal.

“Just how many feminine organs have you had the opportunity to test for durability?” asks Will, half mischievous, half jealous, and completely curious.

“Enough.” is the answer.

Does Will detect a hint of embarrassment?

Not next door, definitely not next door. The woman next door has just demanded to be spanked so loudly he is sure the entire floor heard her.

“Wait a second,” he pauses “Am I the first man you’ve ever been with?”

His partner turns to face him, with the weird effect of his eyes still being covered by the pillow he borrowed/stole “No. Why? Do I seem inexperienced with-”

“With the male organism? Hell no. I didn’t think Eastern European cultures were accepting of same-sex relationships.”

Hannibal snorts “They are not, my dear. I had to make myself quite comfortable in the closet until I moved into Western Europe. In my day, France and Italy were quite accepting. You were something of an odd-ball if you hadn’t been with a member of your own gender at some point.”

Will tries to picture what kind of young man (older man? Surely not) would have attracted twenty-something Hannibal’s eye. Suave? Debonair? Or some kind of countryside, turnip-truck trash with a good education and a mean streak like he is?   
Somehow, he cannot imagine men running from their backwoods bayou upbringing and beer-gutted father were in an excess of supply in Paris or Italy, or wherever the hell it is Hannibal left his virginity.

The recipient of such a prize must have been something to see.  
He suspects they met in an art gallery in Rome, or at some socialite party for pretty young things in a Parisian cougar’s house. The courtship would have been more of an intellectual attraction at first, until one of them had the epiphany that the other could be made love to. Or just fucked, depending on how much of an attachment had developed at that point.

It had to be Hannibal who was propositioned. He had to have accepted the invitation (shy request? Drunken suggestion?) out of curiosity and a bit of lust, but more of one than the other. It would have been like a female praying mantis thinking: ‘Yes, this one will do. I have no qualms about eating this one after I’ve taken my pleasure.’

Will finds himself chuckling under his breath.

“What?” 

“Nothing. Praying mantises. Nothing.”

The woman next door demands to be slapped harder. There is the sound of flesh on flesh, followed by a breathy gasp.

Inwardly, Will wonders how much longer the couple next door intends to keep going. The man mutters a steady stream of filth into his partner’s ear. Most of it is indistinct, and what he does catch would make even a prostitute blush.  
Unspeakable plans with peanut butter and where he thinks she should get pierced next.

The clumsy, disgusting pillow-talk next door reminds Will of his own first encounter with a member of his own gender in the bedroom.

“Did I ever tell you about Dan Adams?”

Hannibal’s body seems to tense by just a fraction. He dislikes remembering Will has had other partners, aside from him. It reminds him other people’s hands have been where he would prefer to think only his have gone.

He responds civilly, all the same “No, I don’t believe you have.” and he asks, even though he already knows. He does that sometimes; pretending Will isn’t as easy to read to him as an open book, just to give Will that feeling that he’s more of an autonomous, unpredictable creature than he really is “Your first boyfriend?”

“I wouldn’t call him a boyfriend.”

Going by the second round of tightening- really, it is like someone is twisting a screw into the base of Hannibal’s spine- Hannibal has already guessed what Will is about to tell him again.

Will goes ahead and tells him anyway “More like a good friend. Best friend, I guess. I wasn’t really the kind of kid who had best friends, but if I had been, then Dan Adams would have been mine.”

“A neighbour?”

“Our dads worked together. My dad didn’t really like working with Mr Adams. One, because Mr Adams was a better mechanic than he was, and two, because Mr Adams still had a wife. A large part of it was probably race. My father was too proud to admit he was a racist.”

Dan Adams. Nothing much to him. He wasn’t interested in anything but fishing and seeing how close he could get to an alligator before it snapped at him.  
Will needed simplicity back then, before he got out from under his father’s tin roof, and Dan Adams had simplicity in spades.

When he explains this to Hannibal, he finds himself especially emphasising how damned boring Dan Adams was. If he didn’t have a fishing pole in his hand, Dan wasn’t happy. Will was like that as a young man too, but his weapon of choice was a pen. And it was something he could carry around with him; he didn’t have to be within 50 feet of a body of water at all times, just in case he was seized by the urge to yank a catfish out of the bayou. 

They hadn’t been that young when they did it.  
Will was a few months away from his eighteenth birthday. The light at the end of the tunnel, as he perceived it, rushing to greet him with adult promises of freedom and financial independence. The thought that he would never have to see his father again if he didn’t want to had hit him early that morning and cheered him immensely.

Dan Adams was fishing about a mile away from Will’s house, deep in a thicket of mangroves with his feet propped up on the knobby knees protruding from the dirt and a hayseed in his mouth. Will thought he looked foolish- like every illustration of Tom Sawyer ever made.

At no point did it enter his mind Dan Adams was attractive, though he might have been. As an adult, his memory is blurry. His tastes are refined beyond what a young, experimenting Will might have looked for- sculpted muscles and shiny eyes, and all that. He could have had a single eye in the middle of his forehead for all Will can remember. 

“I doubt very much you would forget if your first was a Cyclops.” says Hannibal, somewhat tartly.

It occurs to Will he may want a physical description of the teenager to extrapolate into the man in his late thirties Dan Adams will be by now. Possibly to track him down and kill him. Probably to Google Image-search him and make sure Will didn’t have his first same-sex sexual encounter with a stunner, and then send something like a single wilted rose, or if he was feeling especially mischievous, a dead bird to Adams’ current address. 

At any rate, Will had been inspired by his epiphany. Inspired to do something daring and reckless to prove how adult he was. When he suggested doing something to Dan Adams, Dan Adams wanted to see which one of them could pull an alligator by the tail first.  
They settled on stealing something from Will’s father’s stash. The stash was expansive and cheap, and almost not a single bottle in the lot had been emptied before the next one was opened and its predecessor left to stew and grow more potent.

They were careful in choosing. Around those parts, the moonshine could knock the shell off a tortoise and probably burn a hole in a throat while it was at it. If the dregs looked home-made, they steered clear of it.  
Will also had to shoot down Dan’s idea of combining all of the dregs in one massive cocktail of stale poison, for fear that Dan might give himself brain damage.

They settled on a half-full bottle of liquor. Jack Daniels, because Will had seen a lot of young, stylish looking emancipated types swigging from a shared bottle when he worked on the docks, sometimes. Will was an inexperienced drinker- he didn’t actually like drinking, and most beer tasted like warm piss to him.  
Dan Adams was too busy disturbing the wildlife to sample much in the way of alcohol.

“So,” says Will “You can imagine what happens.”

Another obscene noise next door.

“I suppose I can.” admits Hannibal “And I imagine it ruined the friendship.”

“Thoroughly.”

“And did you enjoy it?”

“Have you ever taken it up the ass without lube?”

Hannibal cracks up.  
It still freaks Will out a little when he does this. Even though they are to the point where they sleep so closely together, a single-sized bed would accommodate them better than any king-size, it still alarms Will a little bit to realise his partner can be giggly. Not every one of his laughs is wry or ironic or secretly knowing.

“It wasn’t all bad. It was difficult, though. Inexperienced and clumsy and way stickier than I thought it was going to be. We never spoke to each other again, after we sobered up.”

The days of confusion and shame that tortured him after this all come rushing back at once.  
What little religion Will had no yet had wrung out of him by fierce scepticism (and defiance aimed at a father for whom ‘Bible-thumper’ would be putting it mildly) crawled into young Will’s mind and had him convinced he had just booked himself on the express train to H-E double toothpicks.  
He couldn’t look at Dan Adams. He couldn’t sit down comfortably for four days afterwards either.

It wasn’t until he had moved out and enrolled himself in a community college out-of-state he gathered the courage to have another stab at relationships. Like, actual relationships, as oppose to painful, groping collisions of flesh by the banks of a swamp while alligators slapped their tails in the distance and the smell of Jack Daniels souring on hot breath washed over him.

“How long until you had another…encounter with our gender?”

Hannibal’s curiosity is as touching as it is possessive. Will decides he likes it, filing away the idea that a jealous Hannibal is an affectionate Hannibal for later.  
“I must have gone through two girlfriends before I took on a boyfriend. I was still in the South, Hannibal, so the atmosphere wasn’t exactly welcoming of that kind of-”

“BUGGER!” screams the woman, startlingly loudly. Will cannot tell if it is an expletive or an order.

“-business even in the more liberal areas,” he finishes “I guess I’ve only had two proper relationships with men, and both of those were in Baltimore, when I was with the Police.”

“Ah.”

Evidently, he is relieved. So Hannibal’s partner did not bury himself in meaningless sex for the majority of his adult life. He was shy and reluctant to get near people, mostly because people pissed him off. It must be a load off his chest to realise Will has always been this anti-social and irritable.

Next door, the gasps and other noises increase in pitch and rhythm. 

“There they go.” observes Will.

“Does that sound genuine to you?”

“No way.”

Two grunts. A sound of bedsprings creaking as the two next door fall apart.

Hannibal and Will clap softly and exchange wry smiles.

“Shit,” says the woman, breathless and tired “I think I tore a bit.”

 

 

Freddie Lounds has a scoop.

One helluva scoop. She doesn’t know what it is yet, but by the look on Jack Crawford’s face when he sees her weaving through the officers, it is something major. Jack generally reserved the priceless expression on his face, the one that is full of violence straining at the surface of a calm composure like pus at the tip of a white-headed zit, for cases where Freddie’s interference and interest was truly the very last thing he wanted or needed.  
Some of Freddie’s very best stories have come along when she has been greeted by Jack’s zit-face. Far from making her uncomfortable or apprehensive, Freddie is excited.

She reaches casually into her pocket, ensuring that the small recording device tucked inside a stray glove in there is still on. To make the movement seem more natural, Freddie plucks a packet of tissues from the same pocket and honks loudly into one.

The agent next to Jack whispers something unintelligible. Beautiful woman. Familiar woman.  
Frankly, Freddie cannot believe that Mercy has yet to realise one of the agents sent in to save this quaint little town from the Hand is that old flame that ended so disastrously. And she would prefer Mercy remain ignorant. The last time they broke up, Freddie had to procure several gallons of ice cream and a cd of muzak to calm Mercy down.  
Possibly the worst weekend of her life, thanks to the awful music, and to the heart-wrenching scene Mercy made by beating her fists on the floor and wailing that she was never going to be loved like that again. But, God, was the ice cream wonderful. She must have eaten an entire tree’s worth of macadamia nuts in hers. 

“Ms Lounds.” says Crawford stiffly “Or is it Mrs?”

“It will be Mrs soon, if I get my way,” Freddie stashes the tissue back in her pocket, her fingers grazing the recording device reassuringly “But let’s keep our working and private lives separate for the night, shall we?”

Crawford turns to the Sheriff “This woman is with the media. In a sense, this woman is a substantial portion of the media. If you want this investigation to go smoothly, I suggest you throw her out on her ass right now.”

The other agent is just giving her a confused look. That slightly defensive, but more terrified, skittish look that speaks of a freshly minted agent facing down their first media vulture.  
Freddie does find this particular group adorable. Easy to crack as well, most of the time. From the way this woman shrinks into Crawford’s shadow at her approach, though, Freddie would guess this agent might be immune to her charms.

The Sheriff clearly has no idea what to do.  
From what Freddie has gleaned, some kind of strict black-out has been imposed on the town. A media black-out, whereby no one is able to send messages about the Hand of Jophiel out on the internet. This goes deep; not just the surface social medias are being restricted and blocked the moment someone mentions the Hand and their grisly murders, but the deeper, less savoury medias are being censored.

Whatever is going here goes deep.  
The Sheriff, as backwoods and good-ol’ boy as he appears to be, understands this, and understands that he is sitting in a web of lies. The slightest movement in either direction will summon up whatever spider lurks in the centre to dissolve his insides and suck them out, so he is afraid, of course.

But mostly just confused.  
How did this woman get here? How did Freddie Lounds manage to get into town? The Freddie Lounds, the award-winning author and

“You nosy piece of shit!”

That too.

Freddie looks to the side and is pleasantly surprised to see Price, bent over one of the mangled bodies. He looks livid. And pleased to see her, pleased in the way that anyone is when they see a familiar face, but mostly livid.

He straightens up, strips off his gloves and throws them into the snow “Shouldn’t you be exchanging blowjobs for some face-time with Charles Manson? I thought you were writing a book about him.”

“Publishing a manuscript of interviews, yes.”

Price practically growls. Winston actually does, who Freddie is surprised to see. She was hoping Will Graham’s dogs were all dead, along with every other trace of him. She personally intends to burn down his house in Wolf Trap the moment she gets the time and gets her hands on enough gasoline. After she told Fereydoon the specifics of how she lost her arm, he volunteered to help her eagerly.

It’s going to be a nice trip, when they get around to it.

“Well, what the hell are you doing here?” demands Price.  
With each passing second, he grows more and more angry. The colouring of his face has begun to resemble the exposed muscles of the body lying beside him.

“I’m visiting a friend. The exhibition about the Red Dragon. She invited me to come with her, because one of her works was included. My college room-mate. If you’re desperate to get the truth, go ahead and call her.”

Freddie gets out one of her many business phones, unlocks the screen and tosses it at Price, who catches it smoothly. His reflexes were sharpened from working in the morgue all those years with Zeller; according to one of Freddie’s inside sources, those two threw implements to and at each other rather than passing them in an orderly fashion. Price looks at the phone in disgust. Then curiosity.

“Who’s the stud?” he asks, referring to the picture of a topless Fereydoon planting tulips which serves as her wallpaper.

“My boyfriend. Agent Crawford, I wonder if we might have a word apart? Behind any of these vaults will do. I promise you can scream if you fear my intentions aren’t pure. And I’m sure you don’t want these fine agents to hear what I have to say.”

All eyes turn on her, then onto Jack, waiting for his reaction.

“Don’t do it, Jack.” mutters Price. He has begun to look through Freddie’s photos and makes an approving noise every time he finds another shirtless Fereydoon.

 

But Jack Crawford knows what she’s talking about.

Freddie knows from the look in his eye that he knows exactly what she wants to discuss.  
She also guesses he wants to punch her more than ever.

“Alright.” he concedes.

The other agent starts to protest, but he silences her with a significant look. For a moment, it looks like a stern father silencing his recalcitrant teenager.  
The agent, Tahcawin Walker, closes her mouth and narrows her eyes at Freddie. Freddie returns this stinker of a glare with a cool stare, willing herself not to crack up. From recalcitrant teenager to disgruntled puppy. This girl is definitely new on the job.

Should she survive this particular case with her mind intact instead of, say, fleeing to a less stressful job like commercial piloting or bomb defusing, she'll become like Jack. Freddie can tell. She has developed a good sense over the years for when someone has got what it takes to survive policing, particularly policing brutal murders and the maniacs that commit them.  
They all come out shrivelled and disillusioned, but as survivors all the same. 

Jack follows her reluctantly out of sight and earshot. Freddie picked the vault she wanted to discuss what she has to discuss the moment she entered the graveyard; it is a dull, marble structure, more like a tent than a vault, towards the back of the pool of light cast by the flood-lights.

Freddie motions for Jack to go in front of her. He narrows his eyes at her, but goes down the steps first. She notices his hand goes to the gun underneath his jacket. Of course- he thinks the vault may be full of Hand members in hiding.  
Freddie hadn't considered that. Anyone of the intelligence to support the fanaticism and psychopathy it takes to join a cult will have had the good sense to get the hell out of Dodge by now. Perhaps it is something else.

After all, she can't pretend she enjoys the dark after the horrors those two subjected her to. Blindfolded in a room without light. Seemed like a tautology to her. Why blindfold her if they weren't going to turn on any of the lights anyway?  
A waste of time and fabric, since the blindfold was actually just a piece of her bedsheets cut away neatly with the same knife that parted her arm from her shoulder's company a few moments later. 

"Well?" Says Jack from the bottom of the stairs.

Something furry and sweater-ed passes Freddie's legs, nearly knocking her into the snow. 

"How are you, Agent?" she searches for a purchase in the wall, and, finding none, descends into the inky darkness with her arms rigid at her sides.

"Tired. Let's make this fast, Ms Lounds."

"I wanted to talk to you. About them."

Now Jack gets why she has lead him away from the others and coaxed him into a crypt.  
There could be no better setting to talk about them, could there? A crypt.

"Why?"

The blunt, uninterested tone in his voice surprses her. She would think that any new information she might have to dangle in front of his nose would be of interest to him, but apparently not.  
He has not become that damned jaded, has he?

"Why? Because they are murderers at large. Why wouldn't you want to talk about them?"

"Everything you have ever said about Lecter and Graham has been related to a conspiracy theory or your book sales. I honestly cannot think of anything you can tell me even worth the time it would take to dismiss."

She decides to take it another direction. Not a subtle direction, but then, Freddie was never one for subtlety "It doesn't make you tired? Exhausted? Knowing, every day, every night, it might be the day or the night they turn up on your doorstep for the rest of you? I know they didn't take anything physical from you, Jack, but this?" she waves her prosthetic arm, even though he cannot see it "This is a promise. A claim. This is what it looks like when a serial killer marks its territory."

"They can hardly be expected to piss up future victims like big cats and trees, can they?" he replies snippily.

Now it is Freddie's turn to fight down an urge to break his nose. 

"This is about the same, Agent."

"You think you've seen them? Is that what you want to tell me?"

Freddie doesn't like this. Usually, she is the one to have others guessing. But Jack Crawford's demeanour is so petty and tired, she is just beyond confused at this point.

"I don't care that you've seen them," he continues "I don't care if they've both walked right up to your house with knives and Tabasco sauce for your other arm. I have done nothing but try to move past this since it happened, and it has been almost five years, and you haven't begun to move past it, have you? I know there's no recovery. Complete or incomplete, there is no recovering from what happens to a person when they know those two. But do you have to keep coming back to remind me? Can't you just keep your nose in your own life? If you're out to ruin a life, ruin your own."

He makes a move to push past her, to exit the vault before she can retort. Freddie grabs his arm with her prosthetic. Her grip strength can vary- sometimes too weak to actually hold onto what she meant to, and other times strong enough to crush an aluminium can into the second dimension.  
This is a case of the latter. She doesn't mean to. All the same, it is incredibly satisfying.

Remarkably, Jack doesn't cuss at her. Winston inserts himself between their legs, although his owner is silent and stoic. He knows something is wrong, and is willing to defend the man who feeds him at the drop of a hat.

"I'm out to save lives."

"With what? Your Pulitzer?"

"With the truth. You and I. We need to tell the public the truth. Screw what Purnell says she'll do to us. Fuck Purnell entirely, in fact. I know an officer died of a broken neck that night. Satrapi. Her head twisted all the way around. Super-human strength. Or a predator defending its mate. Something like that, right? And I know you know too, Jack, because I know you were the one who shot the body afterwards and made it look like she broke her neck falling down the light-house steps. People have a right to know, Jack, they have a right to know which monsters are out there."

"Let go of me."

Winston growls.

Not at Freddie. At the back of the vault. There is a rasp of stone, and then what happens next is so startling they both scream.

Someone or something charges them from the back of the vault. Because it is almost completely dark, the thing fails to pass between them as it evidently means to. Freddie feels the anatomy of a young girl barrel into her chest. Thanks to her grip on Jack, Freddie stays upright. Instinctively, she grabs the struggling, bucking figure pressed into her and feels Jack doing the same. Pulling her by the hair, she thinks.

Beneath and between them, Winston's growl is muffled by what must be a chunk of leg in his jaws.  
The girl lets out a wail of frustration and confirms her young age with the shrillness of it. 

Shouts from the outside of the vault draw closer.  
Jack draws his gun and presses it to the girl's temple- Freddie can see the steel glinting in what little moonlight there is to illuminate it.

"On the ground!" bellows Jack. "Get down on the ground now!"

At the same time, he starts pushing her towards the floor.   
Freddie decides she might as well elbow the girl between the shoulder-blades to make the process a little faster.

"Winston, heel!"

The dog releases the leg and a moment later, dashes to the top of the stairs and postures and barks in front of the steps. In spite of his sweater, he manages to look quite threatening.

The Sheriff has appeared at the top of the stairs, by the time the girl is on the ground.

"What?" is all he can say "What? What!"

"I'm guessing it's a finger." says Jack.

The girl's screams are muffled in the floor.

"A finger?" repeats the Sheriff incredulously.

"You know. Severed from the Hand."


	28. And the plot thickens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two plot twists in this one. Yay?

When Bedelia du Maurier gets the letter, she has just finished visiting with Alana and her child. That is how she thinks of it.  
Visiting.

The word a grandmother might employ to describe a chat with a grandchild. Hieronymus is certainly nowhere near anything like that to her. Not in her mind and not in reality.  
Bedelia knows this, but she cannot help but think of the word her own grandmother would use. When she talked to people, she was ‘visiting’.  
Bedelia has just finished visiting with Alana and Hieronymus when Liezel appears in the hall, blocking her way.

Her face is ashen. Her posture is shrunken, and the downturn of her mouth suggests she is ashamed or afraid of something.

Without a word, she holds out a crisp, white envelope to Bedelia. The letter has already been opened; Bedelia no longer possesses enough of the fine motor functions to open letters for herself anyway. Liezel is showing her the writing on the front.

Actually, ‘writing’ is a rather dull term to apply to the script on the envelope. The letters are sketched, so finely in some places that the shapes resemble the thin legs of insects or eyelashes. In other places, fat and rounded, reminding Bedelia of a pregnant belly. She thought she might be pregnant once, in Rome. Granted, menopause had already begun by then. Besides that she and Hannibal were completely celibate (by his choice, not hers), but she had genuinely thought for a few days she might be experiencing a case of Immaculate Conception.  
It turned out to be a stomach bug and a brief break from reality.

From then on, whenever Bedelia looked at Hannibal’s handwriting, she saw the fullness of pregnancy in the curves of the letters.

A tear wells up in the corner of the eye which functions best. She does not think to let it fall or to blink it away.

Liezel slips the letter from the envelope and holds it in front of Bedelia.

He doesn’t have much to say to her, which makes a change. Once, he was eloquent and engaging. Once, he wanted her company and her attention. He wanted to see how long he could hold her interest for, and what he could compel her to do with her apparent attraction to him.  
Would she lie for him? Would she lie for herself because he told her it was best?

Now, he appears to have lost interest in questioning her.

The handwriting is his.   
Her hand trembles a touch more violently than usual as she opens the letter and unfolds the page, pinching her knuckles around a crisp corner.  
Her mouth tightens.

The handwriting on the page is not his.

This is a far less artistic script. The hurried, harried handwriting which never really evolved from the chicken-scratch that would have been used in high-school. The kind of writing one might expect to see sprawled in non-sequiturs across the whiteboard of a university lecture hall.   
Will Graham’s handwriting. She remembers, at one point, attempting to comfort herself in the early days of their surreptitious and strange courtship by comparing their handwriting.

She had a letter from Hannibal and a police report, signed at the bottom in Will Graham’s signature, which looked more to Bedelia like a spider curling up in death than initials. One evening, after downing a little more wine than her personal trainer would have recommended, she dug these two documents out of her desk and inspected them side-by-side.  
She comforted herself with the thought that Hannibal could never love, admire, or whatever it was he was trying out- he would never manage it with a man who wrote like a high-school senior in the last ten minutes of a test.

Bedelia was wrong.  
Evidently, Bedelia is still wrong.

“Oh,” she slurs to herself “I was so hoping you’d eaten him by now.”

A vain, unfounded hope, but one which she cherished.

Though she tells herself she no longer wants to own Hannibal the way she did before, Bedelia knows this is not true. She knows a lie when she hears one. Especially in the sound of her own voice.

“’You have our attention.’” says Liezel.

Her boss’ stillness has unnerved her. Whatever shows in Bedelia’s eyes must not be pretty right now. Liezel has recited the letter in an attempt to bring her back to reality- however twisted and upsetting her reality is, in fact.

It is more of a note than a letter, being composed of only a single-line. Like one of those throw-away thank-you cards that get passed around after Christmas and birthdays. Full of false sincerity and a cheap goodwill that makes one’s fingers feel greasy after one has put it down.

“Yes.”   
Her mouth is dry. She cannot think of what to say to Liezel. What is there to say? 

Bedelia doesn’t even know what to tell herself. This is it, isn’t it? This is the start of the culmination of years of bitterness. Long, long years of those torturous ‘what if’s and the maddening sway of the loose ends which haunt her.

Whatever they started in Italy- in her practice, when her hand went down her patient’s throat in an attempt to pull the swollen tongue free- is going to end, perhaps within a matter of days. Hours? 

With an effort, she manages to lick her lips “Bring the woman. Leave the child.”

 

Alana is bruised when she appears in front of Bedelia. Her lip is bloody from what must have been a powerful back-hand. An eye is shadowed with blossoming bruise-tissue, and her collar has been jerked askew.

The moment she sees Bedelia, she prepares to spit at her. Liezel wheels her boss smartly out of the way and positions her at an angle where Alana cannot reach her. Two guards hold onto either of her arms, but they have to strain. She is slight compared to them. Twig-like, even, but the guards are like two children struggling to hold onto a kite in a storm. At any moment, she might snap lose and fly for Bedelia.

“Calm down,” orders Bedelia, pleased with the clarity of her words. Since reading the note, she seems to have gained a little more control over her speech. Or, at least, gathered up the willpower to minimise the slur that the drooping angle of her mouth creates naturally “I have no intention of hurting your son.”

This catches her off-guard. Alana’s eyes are wide and wary, and a little bloodshot from the previous, sleepless night.

“What.” a strand of hair is blown from her lips and sticks to her sweaty cheek.

“I said, I have no intention of hurting Hieronymus. I just want to show you something, and I think you will find it enlightening…well, I hope you will.”

 

It takes five people to get the girl into one of the cars.  
The girl, who is first identified by a shriek of surprise from Officer Singh (“That’s my neighbour’s kid! Rosalie!”) does everything she can to get away.  
She bites. She kicks. She screams the foulest expletives she can think of, and when she runs out of material, settles for howling “FASCISTS” in between the bites she attempts to take out of the arms that hold her back.

Jack and Freddie are the first to wrestle her up the staircase of the crypt. Once the girl sees she is surrounded, Rosalie goes from frustrated to feral. She lets out a snarl, the like of which Jack has not heard since the last time he had to hold Winston down to give him a pill he kept licking the peanut butter off of. With an unexpected, manic burst of strength, she tears herself from their arms. Freddie’s prosthetic arm is still clenched tight onto her shirt. As Rosalie strains with all her might, the back of the tank-top rips off.

The officers are unsure of what to do. Rosalie takes advantage of this, lowering her shoulder and charging through them. Or trying, anyway. She barely makes it two feet before Tahcawin slams sideways into the girl and knocks her into the snow. Swiftly, she pins the girl on her stomach by sitting directly on top of her and making a fist around the back of the neck.  
Jack recognises this position; he once saw Will tackle a man to ground and hold him the same way.

“’Gator wrestling. Didn’t peg her for an alligator wrestler.” he mutters breathlessly.

Winston bounds up the steps and plants himself in front of the girl, barking in her face. Rosalie starts to scream. She and the dog compete to be the loudest and most blood-curdling. 

Freddie Lounds stares in awe at the fabric in her fist “Oh my God. Did we catch one? Did we really just catch one? I have to- I have to call Fereydoon. I have to call my editor. I have to call Mercy.”

“Call any one of those people and you’re getting hand-cuffed.” says Jack “Winston, heel!”

They handcuff her. Twice. Someone passes up a hand-knit scarf and has Tahcawin tie that around her mouth, as one of the officers that handcuffed her mops up his bleeding hand with a towel.

When it comes time to lift the girl, she arches her back. She makes jerking, sharp movements that are either attempts to mimic an epileptic fit or a performance of that dance move everyone loved when Jack was in high-school. The Worm or Wombat or something like that with a ‘W’.

“Put her up on your shoulders like a coffin!” shouts Price from the back of the crowd.

Tahcawin seizes the girl and flings her over a shoulder. Two more officers come and grab her knees and legs, restricting her movement by a tiny margin. Rosalie head-butts Tahcawin’s shoulder viciously until another officer comes up and puts her in a headlock, then they begin their awkward, cussing procession to the nearest squad car. 

The Sheriff has no words. He comes to stand next to Jack, apparently just to gape at the scene.

“I’ve seen worse arrests. Had a man that wet himself twice so the officers wouldn’t want to touch him. Had a woman rip her bra off and nearly strangle one of my officers with it when she came near her.”

The Sheriff turns to Jack. His mouth hangs open, like the screw which would hold his jaw shut has popped off.

For some reason, this only makes Jack want to talk more “The worst, though, are the meth-heads. When I was about twenty years younger and maybe fifty pounds slimmer, I got a meth-head backed up into a corner. The bastard was so goddamned high he didn’t even feel the mace, and I must have sprayed him three times.” he rolls the sleeve of his coat back and points to a slim, faint scar on his wrist “He bit me, ripped out a section of vein and ran off with it in his mouth. I have a shunt, here.” he his wrist just beneath the heel of his palm “When my beat partner at the time found him, while I was trying not to bleed out, he was sitting in a dumpster with my vein still in his teeth.”

He should probably stop talking now.

 

Alana follows her. Reluctantly, but at least she no longer needs to be restrained by two ex-Marines. Bedelia moves at a leisurely pace. Far slower than she has to. She is enjoying the intelligent conversation. Alana’s every word may be soaked with venom, but it has been some time since Bedelia really spoke with someone from her past.  
Someone whose idea of good conversation did not entail choosing her clothes for the day or if she needed her catheter adjusted at all?

“Would you mind telling me where we’re going? If you’re taking me away to be killed, I’d like to know.” says Alana stiffly.

“You are safe, Alana. For now, anyway, but I suspect Hannibal has designs of his own for you.”

“I know what you’re doing.”

“I imagine you do. You are a psychologist.”

Alana casts a sceptical glance around the grey hallway Bedelia leads her down. She must expect chainsaws to come whirring from the walls or jets of flame to charbroil her where she stands.   
Bedelia can only imagine the horrors Alana has invented for herself while cramped up in that room. Her son has his drawing to distract himself- and at the rate of improvement he has managed, he’ll be something of a prodigy when he leaves.  
If he does leave. Bedelia has been toying with the idea of keeping him for herself for some time now.

“You want me and Hero as bait to draw in Hannibal and Will. That much I understand. You don’t know my wife very well, but I suspect you know her well enough to guess she would do something like this.”

She falls silent.

They walk and whir on respectively in silence for a few moments.  
Bedelia might as well tell her. It will be interesting to see how Alana takes it.

“What you do not understand is how your wife managed in a few weeks what the law enforcement agencies of the world have been trying for almost four years now?”

“Yes.” Alana’s answer is sullen.

“It’s very simple. You were at Muskrat farm. You know only those for whom Hannibal had specific designs survived. And you know he had help.”

“Help? From that sniper?”

“A childhood friend. She would have been a childhood love, I’m sure, if Hannibal had had the disposition for romance when he was a younger man.”

Alana takes a moment to get it. Longer than Bedelia would have guessed, for a woman of her intelligence. 

“Murasaki Chiyoh.”

“I took to calling her by her first name in the months she lived here. Liezel, get the door, please. We’re going to show Alana how we’re going to kill the bastards.”


End file.
